Week in Review

Unfortunately, despite uploading pictures to my hosts' computer, I still cannot post them here because their internet connection is so slow. However, I will continue to post verbal updates of how things are going here.

This last week, we finished the alfalfa leaf order that we had started working on two or three weeks ago. It did not have to take such a long span of time, but we split up the work because there was no hurry on the order and it was quite small by their standards. A few days ago, Fedex came to pick up our order and send it to Mountain Rose Herbs, one of the two wholesale companies that the farm sells alfalfa leaf to. We loaded 46 sacks of alfalfa onto pallets in the back of the truck, Deborah filled out a billing sheet to pay for shipping, and that was that. It was much more simple than I had imagined.

One of the more tedious parts of the alfalfa leaf production business (such as it is) is the sifting of the leaf and the stems in a grain cleaner. The grain cleaner looks like a giant mesh cone. It rotates around like a rotisserie chicken while someone slowly pours alfalfa leaf into it to sift fine leaves out the bottom and stems out the back. The leaves are scooped up and put into sacks, and the stems are also scooped up to be used as mulch, chicken food (chickens love alfalfa, to my surprise) and sometimes to be re-combined if there is still a lot of leaf left in them. Luckily, we did not have to re-combine the stems this time; we had just enough leaf for the order, but not much more.

It rained from Thursday evening through Sunday, so work was slow during that time. We worked on a horse-drawn mowing machine for part of that time. Mowing machines are more complex than you might imagine, as the blade that cuts the hay actually moves back-and-forth by a series of complex gears that turns the rotational motion of the wheels into a back-and-forth motion on the blade. The blades had to be sharpened, and will continue to be sharpened as we are cutting hay. Apparently, the ideal time to sharpen a mower blade is after only six hours of use. We only have about ten mower blades (all of which have been sharpened at this point), so there will be plenty of sharpening to come. The blades are clamped in place in a vice, then sharpened with a drill with a sander unit attached. It is amazing what sandpaper can do to metal; you can really get a fine point on the blade quickly with the drill-based sharpening unit.

Yesterday and the day before were both sunny, so we got back out to work. The garden is looking amazingly weed free from hand hoeing and the use of the horse-drawn cultivator to kill weeds between the rows. Where I was working last year, weed control was never very good, so I am glad to see that that does not have to be the case. Planting in rows with paths between each row, rather than in beds of clustered plants, is a much more effective way of controlling weeds, at least when using horse-drawn tools. There are many great old cultivators still available from auctions, estate sales, and similar sources.

I spent a large part of yesterday morning using two horses with a small disc, a tool that crushes weeds and clods in the soil in preparation for planting. We are discing about a half-acre to plant more corn, after planting about 3/4 of an acre in corn last week. The patch that I was discing (with some help and supervision from my room-mate Lisa) was very weedy after being plowed in fall and left sitting until early summer, so it will still need a few more passes with the disc and a pass with the harrow (which makes the field smoother and more level) before we can plant.