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It feels so good to be home, to really be home for good. I’ve
lived between places for most of my life, spending as much time at the farm as
possible but only transiently. This past Monday I moved what was left of my apartment
in Athens and am now here for good!
I started putting things away and am just enjoying putting
down roots knowing that in a few months when many of my friends are starting
back to classes I will be happily working in the job I love and living in the
most beautiful county in GA. It really hit home yesterday when I finished
working in the pumpkin patch and I came back to the house to water the garden
and climb into bed, and that was it! I didn’t have to think about getting back
to whatever other place I am living at part-time to do whatever it is I am
supposed to be doing or studying whatever I am supposed to be reading. I still
have reading and studying, but it is for my own benefit- not for some presentation
or test coming up. I love it! Oh, and total plus that I now can be called ‘doctor’.
Aside from the craziness that is moving and trying to unpack
everything (which I can see is going to take me a very long time), I have also been hard at work trying to renovate
the farm and get the pumpkins in. The last two days I’ve been hauling mulch and
hay and breaking a sweat to get the hills finished and they are done! Don’t
they look pretty?
I also bought some things to fix up an irrigation system
that is, as of yet, not in working order. It’ll get there. But I did buy a
mower and have spent a considerable amount of time the past two days mowing the
one acre field the pumpkin hugelkultur is in. The field looks so much better
with a fresh clip job, and it added a substantial amount of nitrogen-rich mulch
to the hugelkulturs so everything is ready to roll.
Tonight as the sun was setting I popped in the seeds. I did
20 hills of ‘Montana Jack’ pumpkins ( a traditional orange jack-o-lantern type
of pumpkin), 10 hills of Jarrahdale (a creamy blue-green), 12 hills of Musquee
de Provence (a short, ribbed pumpkin also called the ‘cinderella pumpkin’),
three hills of Pipian from Tuxpan (a green striped pumpkin), and 3 hills of
Juane Gros de Paris (100lb peach-cream colored giants). Once I finish clearing
the fence on the road I’ll add a few hills of a warted gourd mixture which should
be planted around mid June. Hopefully in
a week or so I will see little baby pumpkin plants popping up all over.
Tomorrow is for the goats, I’ve got some fences to move and
the new barn stalls to work on. Hopefully in a few weeks my little herd will be
growing a bit more with some new additions from upstate New York…
The setting sun over the pumpkin patch
-M
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