A Lot Can Happen in Two Months on a Farm

Hey y’all! I’m back from a much needed hiatus with special thanks to Amy from Leafy Dreams Iowa for dropping in a column in my stead. Though we weren’t planning any time off from the Iowa Farm Companion — just giving way for a friend to introduce herself and her business — the last sixty days have turned out to be one heck of a ride. 

I’m filing this dispatch well beyond my deadline because life got in the way, which is exactly what having a homestead is all about: the balance between the work that needs to be done and the family who needs us.

The neatest thing that happened since I last wrote was that my interview on The Urban Farm Podcast was finally posted, and I couldn’t be more pleased with it. Greg Peterson is a beacon of positivity and hope in a world that desperately needs it. It was really a moment where I felt like I had “arrived” as a player in a very big game.

Through a little persistence and salesmanship, we got our chicken, duck, and goose eggs into two grocery stores and our favorite farm-to-table restaurants in the Des Moines area. It took five tries to get into a particular health food store, but it’s paid off to the point of wondering whether or not we can supply the demand. This is an excellent problem to have.

Since our chicken egg demand has risen so sharply, I began scrounging for laying hens who would be relatively young with several months of production left, but cost-effective enough to make it worth the purchase. Fortunately, I found a farm in northeastern Iowa that was rotating out a breeding flock of Barred Rock hens, so we added just over 200 more birds to the laying flock. We immediately saw why these new hens were so inexpensive. They were bred intensively with a very high rooster-to-hen ratio, and the poor girls were exhausted, missing feathers, and frightened. We immediately quarantined them in the big silver monolith we call the Eggmobile, our twenty-four foot long travel trailer rebuilt into a mobile hen house (formerly the Hot Meth Express, but that’s another story, about the guy who sold it to us), and fed them vitamins, electrolytes, and a high nutrient feed formulated to replenish chickens after a molt. This way, we could let them acclimate to the farm, relax, and start living like chickens should. We call them the Trailer Park Girls — a name that stuck right away.

It’s crazy that just a month ago we were struggling to find cooler space for our eggs, and now the cooler is emptying just as soon as we fill it. The recovering Trailer Park Girls are now leaving the Eggmobile and going outside to forage. Their feathers are growing back, and they’re beginning to lay eggs again. This reinforces our resolve to raise all of our birds on site, because it’s just better for the birds. 

In early March, we had a big surprise. Our burn pile, where we were disposing of the huge logs we couldn't split for firewood, spontaneously reignited while dangerously high winds blew, at a time when a multi-county burn ban was in place. I hadn’t seen so much as a puff of smoke from the pile in two weeks and thought we were in the clear. We weren’t. While the fire grew violently, I placed a call to 911 for help putting it out as a precautionary measure. Twenty minutes later, I placed a second call, as our mulch covered garden beds were catching embers and also burning. Two hours and two thousand gallons of water later, I was handed a personal notice signed by the fire chief advising that burning during a ban was a simple misdemeanor, and the fire was out. Fortunately, they regarded it as the accident it was, and no further action was taken.

In mid-March, my father had a significant stroke, and my mother, who suffers from severe late onset dementia, came to stay with us while we figured out what to do. This is the part that tests a family, let alone a family with a rapidly expanding farm. I have been struggling with how to approach my aging parents about their increasing inability to care for themselves as their health declines. It has kept me up at night and worried every day. I’ll spare the details of the last two years, waiting for the moment to arrive when a big event would be the tipping point. If you’ve lived through it, you probably have your own story. I’m not sure anything can prepare a child to have to assume care of both parents, especially when the parent-child relationship has been more strained than joyous.

For two weeks, while my father was in the hospital, my mother stayed with me and my wife in our house. Lydia, my beloved wife, is our angel. She was able to take time off from work and care for my mother night and day. My lady likes her sleep, and my mother likes to roam the house at night, but Lydia handled it with grace and patience. She’s a born caregiver. My mother’s nighttime roaming also had some eerie effects on my hypervigilance and PTSD from my military career — conditions I thought were long dormant. 

Freedom is precious, and I believe in it. Taking away someone’s independence can’t be done lightly. We’ve known for a while that mom needed full-time care and that it was time to have her placed somewhere where she could get it. The moment seemed divine, as if the universe finally put the pieces together, and we found a nice long-term care facility nearby where Mom and Dad can live together. We visit regularly, and Dad and I especially enjoyed being together to watch the University of Iowa Women play in the NCAA finals. Though he won’t ever say it, he’s proud of me for taking charge of the situation with him and Mom, and also for the work we’ve been doing to build this farm. 

Had I known two years ago that my parents would soon abandon their gypsy RV lifestyle, move close to me, and need this much help, we might have delayed our property search. It’s a good thing we didn’t, because we would likely have been locked out of the real estate market for a decade due to high interest rates and low land availability. Instead we took everything on, and we’re thriving. Now it feels like a family farm should.

Somewhere between attorney meetings, my son’s sporting events, beautiful working weather, and keeping the ship upright, we let a few things go. 

First, the tulips we purchased, stratified in the cooler and potted up, missed the mark. It was supposed to be our big plant sale to kick off the season, but I mismanaged the growing conditions, and they bloomed too soon. Normally you’d let the green growth get to a certain point, then drastically cool the room to keep them from blooming, then sell them at just the right time to bloom on Easter Sunday. I forgot to turn off the heat and cool down the room, causing them to bloom about a week early. Oops. I guess we have more for the yard now. 

Second, all of the seeds for our vegetable and flower gardens should now be in growing flats, but they’re still in their packages. We’re a month behind and probably won’t catch up, so we decided to buy in pre-grown seedlings for our vegetables and will direct seed the flowers (i.e., plant the seeds right in the ground). What will be will be, as they say. It’s good to have contingency plans, and this was ours. Already, our gardens have cost us twice what they should have, but maybe there will be a silver lining as we already have all the seeds we’ll need for next year.

The third setback is that we weren’t able to build everything we needed for the season. I like to be done building by April so I can focus on the gardens and not worry about where the newly hatched chicks, ducklings, and turkey poults are going to reside. We should have fenced off our perimeter so the geese quit playing in the road. Our bird barn still needs new siding, and the shop pens still don’t have an aviary extension. 

The good news in all of this is that we already have on hand nearly everything we need to get the work done. My buddy Mike, who graciously let us use his tractor, showed up with a post hole auger, which will keep my shoulders and biceps from exploding in pain and stave off another stern lecture from my physical therapist about something called “rest.” 

Also, we were given a few hundred 100% American Chestnut seedlings, which are the offspring of a widespread university trial to reestablish this once noble tree to our continent. These tree seeds are acclimated to our local growing conditions and are showing great promise in being resistant to the blight that killed off most of them in the United States by 1950. They’re the descendents of some old growth trees found in Missouri that survived when most of them succumbed. 

For the first time ever, I managed to get things planted just prior to a gentle, soaking rain. Our planned sunflower field has morphed into a sunflower/food plot/cover crop menagerie due to both the unavailability of mammoth gray stripe sunflower seed and the time to do a proper cover cropping “chop and drop” to prepare the seedbed. We were planning to grow a stand of wheat, rye, barley, and buckwheat, then terminate it with a roller or sickle mower, which would provide fertilizing material for the soil and slow down and kill any emerging weeds without tillage or chemicals. Instead, we top dressed the entire eight-by-eighty bed with three inches of compost, seeded it, and lightly cultivated with the tractor. I also spent that same day putting down four to six inches of wood chips around our oaks and hazelnuts in a separate paddock of the same size, plus around our new elderberry cuttings. The next day … rain. We got lucky.  

The same person who made the chestnuts available to us also gave us several old world varieties of apples that his great-grandfather brought here from Ireland. I’m excited to see how they grow as we strategize and execute our orchard plans. We have several varieties of blackberry and raspberry plants coming soon; they’ll join at least five varieties of elderberry growing on our property, and we’re up to about twelve varieties of willows that we’ll be able to propagate and sell. 

I don’t know if you believe in the God, the Great Spirit, Karma, that the Universe’s strings are being pulled by fungal hyphae networks, or some combination of all of them, but I know for sure that there are forces in this world bringing good people together and producing the outcomes we deserve. Keep up the positive vibes and be kind to each other, help where you can, and rest when you need it. I know I’ll be trying to do all these things myself. I’m randomly struck with overwhelming emotions when the totality of it all hits, and it feels like joy.