“What we need to start doing,” somebody recently told me, “is start getting back to a bartering system. Get away from dependence on the dollar bill.”
“Yeah,” I said, several times, finally picking up a baseball and doing a partial wind-up, firing a pitch at an imaginary strike zone on a pile of wood chips the [...]
Sunday afternoon was another perfect day for possibly accomplishing something, but I spent most of the afternoon mentally and physically preparing for a trial run for our farm’s upcoming Variety Show act. Scores of people were involved. It was going to be the biggest thing since the launching of the Apollo. We had engineers, architects, [...]
I don’t follow the calendar very well, and since there aren’t any Lutheran churches in Anderson Valley I wasn’t aware that last Tuesday was actually Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras. All the same, as the temperature climbed up to 70° in the afternoon, with barely a trace of breeze, I couldn’t help feeling that groping [...]
Dandelions are blooming along Lambert Lane. When I walk into town in the mornings or evenings I work up a sweat, overdressed for the balmy conditions. With water flowing audibly in the creeks, the grass and clover growing dark green, this would ordinarily be a low-stress time of year at the farm. But the [...]
Trees are losing their grip and falling wholesale throughout the North Coast as the ground is saturated for the first time in four years, and storm winds are blowing. On the gravel portion of Lambert Lane an almond tree recently tumbled, blocking the road. I suspect that gophers are partially responsible. In the dry seasons [...]
Maybe a ton of carrots are still soaking in the moist soil. The water on the higher part of the field has abated, but the next wave of heavy rain will probably do the carrots in, turning them to something like carrot juice that has been on the shelf for years. When you pull the [...]
The pastures in our part of the Valley are swarming with opportunistic robins as the soils are saturated and earthworms are strung out like junkies on the surface. “Looks like the robins just migrated into the area,” I said to a local resident who got one of my bitch’s pups and was watching her fight [...]
As I was milking the cows Friday evening, meditating and watching udders deflate while the pulsator clicked a rhythm on the floor tank, it occurred to me that things are going really well at the farm. My boys are more or less home schooling half the time, and we’d spent most of the afternoon cutting [...]
Friday morning was balmy with the southwestern air flow, the kind of weather that makes you feel like you ought to be getting something done at the time of year when maybe you actually ought to be visiting somebody that you don’t see as often as you’d like. Or maybe just enjoying what you already [...]
The promises of rain have been mostly hopeful as forecasters see abundant moisture in the El Niño conditions of the Pacific headed our way, but fizzling at the first contact with land. Evidently the snow covering most of the Great Plains is creating this vast trough, they call it, with low pressure there, causing a [...]
