Yokna Patawpha Bottoms Farm
Oxford, Mississippi
We started the day in our usual way – with a meandering walk across the field, through the woods, across the creek, along the fields, and to the chicken coop to check for eggs.
The hens are getting older, it’s been cold, several are molting, and food is less rich in the nonharvest months, so egg production has been slow – one to three eggs a day.
Their water dish had frozen over in the night, so we filled up the backup waterer from the pump and replaced the ice block with something the thirsty birds were much more into.
Jeff had a couple pails of pea seeds he’d been soaking overnight, to get their growth kickstarted. I weeded the trespassing grass from the edge-most row of garlic, and we both worked with the other two WWOOFers and planted almost 600 row feet of them – each pea spaced about three inches apart, three pea-heights deep.
The fields feature peaked, raised beds – the trenches between them were thick with sticky Mississippi mud, rich enough in clay to roll up into balls by rubbing your mud-coated fingers together briefly. We were extremely grateful for our heavy rubber muck boots as we splooged and squashed and oozed around the wetter parts of the field poking peas into the dirt.
After lunch, we got more red-oak-splittin’ practice for when we get home to the Que Sehra homestead – Yokna Bottoms will be hosting a concert/potluck/full moon drum circle Friday night, and they’re going to need all available firewood on hand for it. I split most of it while Kristin hauled it to the porch & stacked it in a neat, crisscrossed, well-ventilated pile, to get as dry as possible over the next few days.
The day had warmed up nicely, into the 50s, so we took a cue from the cats and did some sunbathing on the farmhouse patio, laid out on our (New) Mexican blanket, reading and talking with Doug, sitting on the porch steps.
When the sun chilled out for the day, we headed into Oxford with the crew for veggie burritos at the Taco Shop.
Another beautiful day on the working honeymoon adventure!