The work is good here on the farm. There is plenty of it, but we are taking the task one piece at a time. We are happy with the progress for such a short time. Soon it will be winter, and I won’t go outside when it is below 60 degrees. I don’t have a strategy regarding this problem, so the time to work is now.

Greg taught me how to load and shoot a shotgun. He didn’t think I’d do it, so that’s why I did it, of course. I don’t care for guns, but I understand how it might be necessary here. There are the animals, of course. Even my Amish neighbor has a gun. We heard him shooting today, and my younger kids said, “Fireworks!” My oldest son said, “Hm. Sounds like a .22 probably.” He’s 10 and liking the country very much.

Greg planted seven fruit trees today. We have plans for a miniature orchard: one variety of each type of fruit, two if a pollinator is necessary. I might go for broke (and go broke) if I can get cherries to grow, but I haven’t started those yet. While digging, Greg also found a water line to tap into for drip irrigation. That was good. We’ll mulch tomorrow.

One of the things we are running into is the need for an implement but not wanting to rush into buying something so expensive that might not be useful in the long term and/or wanting to wait until the right price comes along. For example, we have plenty of aged manure in a barn. This is great organic matter to add to the trees, but getting it from point A to point B is an issue since the hens are using the trailer. The trailer was a great purchase, but now we need it and can’t use it. We’ll figure it out, I suppose.

On the menu tonight, we had lasagna. This is neat because I made it from tomatoes I’d canned from the local Amish bulk foods store and cheese I made from my neighbor’s milking cow. The big deal, though, was our first small harvest: a bowl of buttercrunch lettuce. As a Florida native, I’ve never tasted local food. Everything is shipped in from South America or California.

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I’m not normally a food snob, but the taste of freshly picked salad greens was incredible. I’d never eaten butter lettuce that was soft and sweet. I just thought that greens were supposed to taste bad—bitter and stale– because they’re good for you. True enough, I bought the seeds on eBay, but there is no substitution for homegrown lettuce. We would eat my dillweed vinaigrette salad everyday if we could, and in fact, we sometimes do when Boston/butter lettuce is readily available.

You can grow lettuce and a fresh supply of herbs in a bowl wherever you live. You don’t need a farm. I started cilantro so that I could cook Indian food anytime. (Mexican is for the summer, dontcha know, when tomatoes are plenty.) To make raita, masala, curry, pekoras, or nan, a cup or two of fresh cilantro is necessary. We’ve had a lot of use for Indian dishes, now that I have plenty of fresh Jersey cream to use for the base sauce. We also make a lot of ice cream from the Jersey cream. This is just the ticket after a spicy meal.

Greg is not entirely happy with his first chicken tractor, so we might turn that into a cold frame. (He’d like to model the tractors after the wagon looking one that I posted on an earlier post.) A cold frame is like a mini-greenhouse, if you will, that is used in winter to grow things, usually cold-weather vegetables. After tonight’s dinner, we’re even more inclined to do that, just to have sweet butter lettuce that tastes like dessert. I suppose I’d have to outside for that, though, wouldn’t I?

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Someone dropped puppies on our place. We are trying to find them homes by placing a picture in the local magazine.