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.

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.

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,

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.

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

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.

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 …

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