Inhabiting the Habitat

December 27, 2014 QueSehraFarm 2 Comments

From Yokna Bottoms Farm, it was an 11 hour drive to our next host farm – Habitable Spaces, a “sustainable farm & artists residency,” growing in spaces carved from the scrubby oaks, mesquite, and cacti of Texas, out beyond the outskirts of both San Antonio and Austin.

We arrived in the darkness of the new moon, in the first hours of the longest night of the year – winter solstice, time for openings and new things – and immediately ran aground and became happily stuck (Huey Lewis style) upon a rooted tree stump. How metaphorical! I liked it.

Although I wouldn’t completely feel good about it until I was sure the transmission hadn’t been damaged or something …

(this uploaded upside down but I’m just going to leave it as is.)

We cut the stump down the next day and drove to a more convenient dock.

Our dogs got along great with their three girls (Mina, the giant; Lola, the sweet; and Lily, the wild). Our cabin – “El Casa De Escorpio” – was awesome, and surprisingly similar to the Rust Shack back home in layout. It, too, was a pallet shack with a loft – but slightly bigger and significantly more finished than ours, with insulation, wallpaper, a heater, and meticulously and artfully applied interior wall paneling. And a bottle window!

"The House of Scorpio" - until they'd finished the walls, the place became home to dozens of scorpions . — “The House of Scorpio” – until they’d finished the walls, the place became home to dozens of scorpions .

They had a good junkpile/supply, the native rock poking up everywhere was a sexy glassy flint, and animals and evidence of active construction projects were everywhere.

rainwater collection system – totally going to borrow that sediment trap design back home

– needless to say, we immediately felt at home, and were excited to wake up to the reborn sunshine of the first lengthening day of the year.

While helping out with projects, we met the ducks and chickens, the cats and kittens, the friends and family, the pig and the place.

clockwise from foreground: Widget, Cleo, M, Lola, and Lily) — clockwise from foreground: Widget, Cleo, Mina, Lola, and Lily)

We also did a lot of scavenging; a friend’s family had moved away from their farm, and left behind a rich and satisfying array of plunder for Habitable Spaces to pick through.

We ate great food and closed down the the only bar in town and got to know good people, human and otherwise.

It was a damn fine week.

Kris the bartender trying to animate the singing deer

And today Habitable Spaces got the letter announcing that they are now legally a Non Profit organization, with all the benefits entailed!

farming, WWOOFing, Yokna Bottoms Farm

final days in Oxford

December 20, 2014 QueSehraFarm Leave a comment

This was our third and final week spent on Yokna Bottoms Farm, in the beautiful Faulknerian land of northern Mississippi. Preparing t leave back during the first time we WWOOFed here (January 2014), it seemed weird that we might not ever see the characters here again – which makes sense in retrospect, since fate conspired to get us here again this winter.

Widget does not think the chickens deserve all of the bread.

A year later, we’re not thinking about how weird it is that we may never see the Yokna farm and its cast of human, canine, and kitty characters again – because we assume that someday, we probably will.

mixing up worm castings, chicken manure, and dirt into a batch of potting soil for the strawberry project

potting up dozens of little strawberry plants we dug up from a crowded and un-loved patch of field, with Jeff

Gabe chewing through wicked blackberry canes with the flail mower

Kristin bashing low-hanging branches from the pines to make way for the flail mower’s passage

Cleo & Faith in their hours-long staring contest

you can guess how Faith earned her nickname, "Scarf" — you can guess how Faith earned her nickname, “Scarf”

Faith does not mind that Gabe is allergic to her. She may even prefer it.

This week we visited Richardson Farm – a startup operation founded by former Yokna intern Nate, who we’d met last year. He is leasing some really interesting land along a lakeshore, and has big plans for what he’d like to get growing and built there. For now, it’s been fulltime work just getting a liveable shack to stay in, a small greenhouse built, etc – things are starting to come together and it’ll be great to see where it goes from here,

and old treehouse failure decorates the woods of Richardson Farm

Another former Yokna Woofer, Reynaldo came to stay at the Farm over the last few days to house & dog sit for Doug, who left for a few days of family time in New Mexico with the ‘old boys,” Merton and Shivas. We hadn’t met Reyndaldo before, but we’d enjoyed his work – he’d done a great painting of the old farm truck and Missy, which graces the living room wall of the house.

While staying in the house, he’s working on a new piece – a vortex-looking spiral which is steadily resolving into an amazingly well colored and rendered hay bale.

When not housesitting here, Reynaldo is WWOOFing on the nearby Canebreak Farm – another up and coming small organic farm. We went to check it out with him – I wish we had a photo of the sweet bamboo cane thicket growing along one edge of the field, where the farmers hope to one day clear room for tables and chairs – a dining space for the Asian farm-to-table dishes they hope to serve from the produce they grow on the land.

We made cornbread and went to a Chili Cook-Off, where most o the entries included Yokna Bottoms veggies, and longtime Yokna Farm staff Betsey took home the prize … but we felt like the biggest winners, with all the delicious food we got to eat.

At the house, we've gotten into doing crossword puzzles for the first time — At the house, we’ve gotten into doing crossword puzzles for the first time

Tomorrow, we leave for Habitable Spaces in Kingsbury, Texas first thing in the morning!

we got matching fortunes when we went out to eat at the local Noodle Bowl ... pretty fun on the heels of last year's Cookie Coincidence — we got matching fortunes when we went out to eat at the local Noodle Bowl … pretty awesome on the heels of last year’s Cookie Coincidence

farming, WWOOFing, Yokna Bottoms Farm

another Yokna week

December 15, 2014 QueSehraFarm Leave a comment

The second week at Yokna Bottoms Farm was as expected – we worked throughout the weekday mornings, and the rest of the time ate, relaxed, and explored our surroundings in beautiful northern Mississippi.

There was more deja vu from our time here last year, as we dug drainage ditches and continued the pine-tree clearing project (with a new and improved chain rig that Jeff put together), and plenty of hay mulching.

sorting old peppers into keepers and compost

Jeff tests the deer stand we cobbled together from scavenged materials – which we put up on the edge of the field in hopes of harvesting some venison from the cover crop fields

digging ditches to divert waterflow off of the dirt road down to the field

The dogs, of course, are loving it here … although the Yokna Dog Pack lost one member since last year (Nathan moved out with his dog Ella), it gained a new one unofficially – “Grey Dog,” the neighbor’s year-old giant puppy – plus, there is a stray that sometimes hands out with us by the field, which brings the total up to eight … plus four cats and a shifting cast of primates …

Cleo in the field up at Jeff’s place in the nearby hills

Cleo and Benji the Stray (we gave his shaggy eye-fur a trim to help him better see and been seen)

Missy playing with Grey Dog … this is the day that he stole both of Gabe’s work/hoking shoes and made off with them, apparently making multiple trips to bring them back to his house. Over the next couple of days the neighbor found them both (unharmed!) and returned them one at a time …

We have less than a week to go here before we strike out westward toward new territory … time is flying!

a vine-strangled sapling on its way back to the farm to be turned into a proper Wizard Stick

farming, WWOOFing

missed Mississippi

December 9, 2014 QueSehraFarm Leave a comment

When we originally planned our winter journey, we did not plan on returning to any of the same farms we WWOOFed at last year – we’d enjoyed all three, but thought we’d get more from the trip if we did all-new places – meeting all new people, learning entirely new ways of farming, etc.

However, when we looked at a map of the planned route, we realized that Yokna Bottoms Farm in Oxford, Mississippi, was right in the middle of the long stretch of road between my sister’s in northern Illinois, and a farm that had agreed to host us in New Orleans.

It turned out they were accepting WWOOFers again at the time we would be coming through – so we wound up returning this year – once again, we’d kick the trip off as members of the Yokna dog pack.

So, we took turns driving south for 5 hours apiece, stopping twice for gas, watching the sun rise and fall and the vans thermometer creep steadily upward, until it was about 30 degrees warmer than when we’d left that morning and we were pulling into the familiar gravel driveway of Farmer Doug’s house.

We arrived just days after the season’s last farmer’s market, and the final CSA boxes had been delivered.

We were here two months earlier in the year than we had been last time through, so there was still a lot of cold-hardy produce growing in the fields – herbs, kale, broccoli, carrots, lettuce, cabbage, collards, brussel sprouts, and more, in amounts well beyond what we grow back home in our acre or so of cultivated field.

the beds we weeded of bermuda grass rhizomes last year did great this year, and are still bowing up with herbs like cliantro

Although the markets and CSA were finished, the farm was selling produce to several local restaurants, which we harvested with Farm Manager Jeff whenever necessary.

When not harvesting, we worked on other projects – which wound up giving us deja vu.

The farm was running a couple months ahead of schedule this year, so our labor was often the exact same tasks we’d worked on back in January – cutting down and piling up pine trees in the future field, cleaning out and organizing the tool shed, pruning the elderberry bushes, and potting up plants in the greenhouse.

cleaning the shed redux - again with intense mouse allergy trigger action! — cleaning the shed redux – again with intense mouse allergy trigger action!

We also helped prepare the house for a party again – this time, including the decoration of a Christmas tree in our duties.

Finally, we raised a sunken corner of the chicken coop, and patched up gaps that could let predators in.

Widget did the Rat Terrier Thing and caught mice and rats as they scattered out of the shed while we cleaned.

In our downtime, we even got Farmer Doug out on a longboard again! He still doesn’t feel safe on one, but he pushed around carefully a bit until Kristin and I got our fill of zooming around a parking lot, turning gyrations into momentum and basking in the sunshine.

In one of the final Yokna posts from last winter, I said that ” it seems impossible that I may not see (Yokna Bottoms Farm) again” – and it turned out I was right It is great to be back – we’d missed the dogs (Merton, Shivas, Missy, WhatDog), the cats (Faith, Hoobilly, Jack), and the people (Doug, Jeff, Betsey), and it felt like home immediately.

It’s been both educational and interesting to see the restaurant sales side of Yokna’s operations – we just started to do so for the first time last year, on a small scale, and both feel we have much to learn. And like learning a language, it’s ideal to learn by immersion, where all the many complexities and how they interrelated are experienecd directly, not translated up and down through lossy words. Working with people, you pick up so much more than you even realize – not just facts, but processes, ways of thinking about and seeing and solving things, general principles, handy shortcuts, things to avoid, sparks that trigger new ideas … not things you can plan for, organize, or predict – things you get by embracing the “que sera, sera” and simply being open and grateful for what does come into life, surfing from day to day, season to season, always more in the Now than in thoughts of any future plan. Valuable things that come in abundance with WWOOFing!

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Illinois Interlude

December 7, 2014 QueSehraFarm 1 Comment

After we left the Farm, we spent a couple of weeks at Gabe’s sister’s home in Illinois, celebrating the Holidays early, relaxing, and doing some final preservation projects …