Friday, February 21st
Green Flamingo Organics
Oak Hill, FL

Thursday, February 20th
Green Flamingo Organics
Oak Hill, FL

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The main chicken coop door had been left open overnight; the electric fence was back online, so there was no harm to no fowl. However,  today was the day we were to pull down the fence and move it to a new area for the hens to forage in.

This meant that all the chickens had to get back inside their coop so we could work. Heh.

(The previous week, Dawn and Erykah had learned how hard it is to get them all inside, when they’d attempted to round them all up to close the coop for nighttime. They were new to chickens and chicken-duty, and no one had told them that you could simply wait until the sun was going down, and the chickens would all go inside on their own … so they spent an hour running, grabbing, falling, laughing, and cursing before finally giving up on the last half dozen or so that evaded the pre-dusk round-up.)

We had more people this time, but the chickens were just out for the morning, and had zero interest in going inside. Meredith baited  a large group of them in by putting their morning feed in the coop, but at least a third remained outside, avoiding us warily.

We were going to have to chase them down, and get them into the coop door – without letting any of the ones already inside escape.

This was a recipe for hilarity and hijinks.

So I ran and grabbed Kristin’s phone (which got internet service), cranked the volume up to the max, and quickly went to YouTube for the best thing ever in these circumstances:

This is the song that comes into my head every single time I see a person chasing a chicken for some reason, and it always makes me laugh … so this scene and soundtrack was a highlight of the trip.

It played on repeat as we dashed after the chickens, caught them, lost them, stuck them in the door, grabbed at the ones that would escape … I think it went through on repeat three times before we finally captured the final fowl.

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The new roof hadn’t kept the Greenhouse Cardinal from his routine of sneaking in somehow during the evening, lured by the trays of sunflower sprouts, and then needing to be let out the door in the morning – flying around frantically apparently unable to locate or exit through whatever his entrance hole was.

  

Then it was harvest time.

Kristin and I had been doing  a lot of arugula, so we got to work on the total 8 white crates necessary for the day – there had been a lot of demand for arugula lately between the salad mix, restaurant orders, and CSA needs, so the rows had been getting pretty picked over.

It took attention, skill, and patience to get 8 pounds of decent leaves from the various patches throughout the garden, but we were getting pretty good at it.

For lunch we all ate the rump roast we’d gotten from the wild pig, shot by the landowner and cleaned and dressed by Liz and Gary. We accompanied it with rice, carrot and beet salad, and sauteed beet greens. It was delicious, easily the tastiest lunch any of us had at the GFO.

 

After lunch, we tore down a garden of old okra stalks so Liz could run the tractor tiller over the patch and prepare it for new planting.

 

The first batch of marmalade had turned out a bit overly thick and chewy – we made a second batch with refined recipe and techniques.

This batch came out perfect – delicious orange candy spread, sweet and bitter in perfect proportion.

 

The warm nights had the local nocturnal wildlife much more active – there were frogs making crazy, scary choruses in the woods all night long (at first we thought they were raccoons), and the two Trailer Frogs started coming out of the closet, hopping around the interior walls and windows – where they seemed to like to lay in wait for bugs, which worked great for us.

 

They stayed out of the bed – unlike the little green lizard that tickled my thigh and sent me yelping out of the sheets with visions of a giant spider …

Wednesday, February 19th
Green Flamingo Organics
Oak Hill, FL

Three chickens had died in the “POW” coop, one at a time, over several days. They had food and water, the other chickens seemed healthy – as had the ones that died, up until they turned up dead.

We had been thinking maybe there was some kind of toxic weed that certain hens had ingested when we moved the coop, but Meredith had a different theory – a venomous snake, sleeping in the warmth of the nesting boxes. It made sense of many aspects of the mystery, so we armed ourselves with snake killing implements, donned high boots, and headed down to the coop to examine the hay of the nesting boxes.

 

However, when we cleared out the hay, ready to kill the baby rattlesnake or whatever other slithering culprit we might uncover, there was nothing there.  I still think the poisonous snake theory is a winner though – and while we didn’t find a snake, it’s been warmer at night since then, and no more chickens have died, so perhaps the snake has moved on …

For the second time on our honeymoon, we were tapped to re-plastic a greenhouse roof. Last time had been at Chastain Farms in Alabama, where we’d added a second layer of 5mil plastic over the top of the existing, holey layer of plastic.

This greenhouse again had a layer of shredded plastic, but this time we would be ripping that out and replacing it with sturdy sheets of corrugated clear PVC.

We added some 2×4 bracing to screw the panels on the northern side of the greenhouse and got it all up pretty quickly, but ran into complications on the southern half. We needed to add two sections of 8 foot crossbeams, and we’d exhausted the meager scrap lumber pile. Worse, the 8 foot long panels were too short to cover from peak to low end – even without the drip eave we wanted to include, and without the overhang we’d planned on including on the peak, over the top lip of the northern slope.

Fortunately, there was some steel roofing material left over from the outdoor kitchen they’d recently built. So we cut it down to the right length, and folded it into a peak to go over the top of the greenhouse, providing the extra length we needed to roof the southern slope as well as a flap to cover the top lip of the northern slope.

Halfway through the project, the landowner (Liz rented her corner of the land from an orange grove farmer) drove up in his tractor to ask if we wanted the wild pig he’d just shot. He brought it over minutes later and left it in the shade of a live oak, to await Liz’s return from her morning errands.

 

It was a HOT day, and we had no shade to work in, so we were getting good and toasted working on the roof. The dogs hid out inside the greenhouse in the shade while we sweated and swore through the second half of the project.

Finally, we were done – everything lined up, supported, secured, and looking awesome. We picked up the tools and posed for a victory photo with the finished project.

The other WWOOFers were still working in the garden when we finished, but we’d put in our hours for the day and were sun-roasted, sweaty, and on the verge of getting cranky.

So we threw together our bags, threw the dogs in the van, and rolled out to go back to our beach on the Saint John river, driving well over the speed limit down the open road, westbound through the wildlife refuge, watching the sun and the temps heading downward.

We made it just in time to enjoy a solid hour of hot sunshine and swimming in the river – floating along with the languid current, awed by the strange beauty of swaying Spanish moss and clusters of cypress knees.

 

 

We hit the Frosty King again on the way back, and got back in time to help make dinner for the crew, along with the GIANT SPIDER in the sink.

Tuesday, February 18th
Green Flamingo Organics
Oak Hill, FL

 

 

 

Monday, February 17th
Green Flamingo Organics
Oak Hill, FL

Another day off – another day of exploration in nearby nature! We decided that the ocean shore nearby was too full of people, fees, rules, and such baloney. So we decided to head west, inland, away from the coast. We both looked at Google Maps separately, and we both picked the exact same spot without knowing it – a little beach on the Saint John River, within a patch of wilderness named the Hickory Bluff Preserve.

We took a meandering drive toward it, pausing to probe down several dead end roads and trails more fit for an ATV than a car.

 

We arrived to find an empty parking lot and a couple of trailheads – we took the blue trail, toward the river – going first through a dry, sandy palmetto wilderness, and then, as the trail dropped down slightly into the river valley, a gorgeous cypress and live oak forest, with softly swaying curtains of Spanish moss bringing a fantastic atmosphere.

We were both already in love with the place by the time we got to the river, and found a perfect, private beach on the shore of the wide, undeveloped stretch of river – which weirdly flowed from the South to the North, unlike every river I’ve known.

 

Occasionally, the quiet birdsongs and wind through the trees were interrupted by a passing speedboat – but even this was perfect; each boat made a wake that came splashing to the shore – and Cleo is obsessed with chasing such waves. The sandy shore was ideal for her to dash along the water’s edge, chomping and stomping at the cresting waves (compared to the shores of Lake Superior, for example, where on many shores sharp rocks cut up her pads).

 

Cleo quickly made the connection, and when the water was still, she would stand and look imploringly up and down stream, waiting for another boat to appear and bring the waves for her.

 

When the sun went down, we reluctantly left our little paradise, and headed back to civilization.

The drive-through at Frosty King was a perfect way to end the day out  with delicious homemade ice cream in a waffle cone.