This has been, for everyone I suppose, the strangest summer I can remember. It sort of seems like this summer began in March and shows no signs of ending. Instead of having many hours child-free this summer to work while children were at camp, I have had them underfoot, and bored, all spring and summer. I am thankful, of course, that we are all well and active.
Bacon, bacon, bacon!
I managed to get a butcher date with my processing plant on June 8, and consider myself fortunate that I got my meat back on July 13. There is nothing like empty grocery store shelves to spur thoughts about where our food comes from, and so there has been an increased interest in local meat. This is wonderful for everyone, but it does put a backlog in place at the one or two small processing plants accessible to small farmers in South Carolina. So, I now have plenty of meat in stock, and you may email me with an order, visit me at the Blythewood Farmers Market on Wednesdays from 4-7, or order it from my online farm store. Meat is also available at Buddy’s Country Store on Hwy 321/Winnsboro Road in north Columbia.
Because my children will be going back to school in mid-to late-August in some form (I am praying that it will be what I want, which is private preschool, private high school, and homeschooled middle school–but I guess I don’t know that for sure because they could all have to be homeschooled), I will probably not be attending the Blythewood market much past mid-August.
This year has also been a learning experience with flowers. I have been selling flowers at the Blythewood Farmers Market but they are also available for on-farm pickup through my online farm store. I guess one of the few blessings from COVID was extra time at home not spent driving children from place to place that I could devote to soil preparation and planting. As such, I have a large supply of flowers and I have enjoyed meeting and working with several local florists to help them provide locally grown fresh flowers to their customers. My flower bouquets last 7-10 days with proper care.
I also have eggs from my chickens available at the farmers market and online.
If you pick up from the farm, I can arrange no-contact delivery for you on my shady porch.
My children are probably tired of me telling them that they are living through a major historical event and they should write down the details to share with their children. I’m tired of living through a major historical event.
When I wrote my last post, in early March, Coronavirus was still something that was happening somewhere else. I did put out a bottle of hand sanitizer at a farmers market I attended, but I certainly didn’t imagine that five weeks later I would be forced to stay at home by law.
You know this, you are living it too.
I remind my children to be thankful for our blessings: we have a farm, which means we can go outside whenever we want and not risk encountering any people from whom we might need to distance ourselves. We have animals and flowers and food. We are okay, and I hope you are too.
In the reprieve from some of the busyness of daily life, although springtime is still busy on a farm, I have been able to set up a farm store. At first, I intended to use it to make it easy for people to place deposits on the bulk purchase of pastured pork, but I decided to expand it to include cut flower bouquets and eggs.
On the website, which you can access from the Online Farm Store tab on the homepage of this website, or by clicking here, you may pay for items with a credit card and then make arrangements to pick up the items, no contact, from the farm.
For more information about buying a half or a whole hog, click here. When all the hysteria began over buying food and supplies (I had plenty of toilet paper at home because we bought it in bulk before all of this), I was relieved to think of my freezer of meat at home from my pigs when I saw the empty meat cases. Purchasing a half or a whole hog is a way to ensure you have a supply of meat, too.
I do plan to attend the Blythewood Farmers Market on April 22 with eggs and cut flowers, but I am sold out of meat until the next batch of pigs goes to market midsummer.
My farm is located on Muller Road, about half a mile from Muller Road Middle School, convenient to Blythewood and I-77.
All I can really talk about this last month is RAIN. Ordinarily I am happy to see the rain. I know that in the winter in my climate, South Carolina Zone 8a, rain falls. The winter rains fill my well and furnish the lakes and rivers with sufficient water to last through July. Normally, my thoughts on rain are neutral, like those of Robert Louis Stevenson:
Rain by Robert Louis Stevenson
The rain is raining all around, It falls on field and tree, It rains on the umbrellas here, And on the ships at sea.
This sort of rain is probably falling gently on an English garden. It doesn’t wash away homes, plans, or gardens. I like this sort of rain. I appreciate its ability to keep me indoors on a day I would rather be outside in the garden but I need to stay indoors. Maybe I get rainy days because, as an unknown author said,
“God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done.”
(At least I could try to get it done but with three children and lots of mud created by said rain, it’s unlikely that it would actually ever be DONE.)
This winter, we have had Forrest Gump rain:
“One day it started raining, and it didn’t quit for four months. We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin’ rain, and big ol’ fat rain, rain that flew in sideways, and sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath. ”
Forrest must have been in Blythewood, South Carolina instead of Vietnam.
I do take a certain amount of joy in hearing the rain pound on my metal roof. I do not enjoy seeing what scanty topsoil my garden may possess wash down the hill towards the ocean.
I can’t let all this good soil wash away
Erosion
We have been working as hard as possible to stop the erosion around our house. As mother did when I walked with her through the woods as a child, I stop my children when we wander among the trees and look for fox dens to lay logs and sticks horizontally across areas that might become gullies if we don’t stop the erosion.
Over Christmas, my children and I went to the enormous gully at the bottom of my parents’ pasture to gather greenery to make wreaths that began to form, I suppose, when my great-grandfather cut all the timber off of the gently sloping hill. He cut the timber as compensation for being able to use the land, and he removed it all, with the help of a few relatives, by using an ax to cut the trees and mules to move the timber. Imagine the determination it took for him to do this sort of work with no chainsaw, backhoe, bulldozer, truck, or any other sort of machinery.
There are no deep gullies on my property, but there are the beginnings of gullies. I live in the relative flat-lands of the middle of South Carolina, and so gravity has been on the side of the people who cleared the trees from this land the first time. As I tell my daughter when she wonders when she will ever need to know formulas about gravity and mass and slope and such, water flowing down a hill moves faster and is more destructive than water flowing along a flat surface, and the steeper the slope of the hill, the faster it moves.
Gardening in spite of the rain
To plant my crops on time, I have been employing several strategies from no-till methods of cultivation. I acquired many of my ideas from the book, “The Market Gardener,” by J.M. Fortier. He has a website that details much of the information in his book.
I gleaned many of my weed-control strategies from him and I also wrote my own eBook, called How to Have a Weed-Free Garden: Using easy organic methods. Fortier, because he lives in Canada, is mostly concerned with being able to plant on time because of snow and frozen ground. He uses tarps both to kill weeds and to keep the soil dry and to accelerate thawing of the soil in the spring.
I use his methods to keep my soil from washing away and to enable me to plant even when the entire world, it seems, is covered with mud. This morning I took the video below to show you my garden even in the midst of this week’s monsoon. The ditches between the raised beds prevent the soil in the planting beds from washing away.
The weather forecast promises me three days of sunshine after today, so I intend to don boots, wade through the mud, and plant my seedlings in the dry soil. You all would like flower bouquets in time for Easter, maybe, or at least Mother’s Day, right? I surely would.
Here is what I was doing in another March when the weather was behaving: planting potatoes! It is time to get them into the ground if you can save them from the rain. Make sure your soil is well-drained because they will rot if left in muddy soil.
This winter has been busy with homeschooling, tax preparation, meeting with chefs to promote my pastured pork, homeschooling (yes again), The Four Year Old (he needs an entire category to himself), fixing pig fence, driving kids places, obtaining fall leaves for mulch, and getting piglets.
I would like to be spending lots of time preparing garden beds for the spring, but instead I am trying to keep the farm from washing away in all of the rain. I have started many seedlings under the new grow lights I got for Christmas: I just need a nice block of time without any rain to get plants into the ground.
Last month, I purchased 6 piglets from a local farmer. They are happy to play in the woods and (mostly) stay inside the electric fence. One of the pigs is unusually friendly and is also extremely intelligent. All pigs are supposed to have the intelligence of a 3 year old child but they just lack the verbal skills to tell us their thoughts.
This pig quickly figured out who is in charge of feeding him, and he leans against me and demands that I scratch his head in the same way a dog might. The rest of them will sniff my hand, but if I move to pet them they scatter in fear. He closes his eyes and grunts in satisfaction as I scratch him. His name is Bacon, and he will make a visit to the butcher with the rest of the pigs. He’s an otherwise entirely useless castrated male. I do not want to feed a potentially 500 pound animal for the rest of his natural life. Do you know how many 50 pound bags of feed per week he would require at full size? Many more pounds of feed than your average dog, that’s for sure!
He is also the first pig to figure out when the electric fence is not putting out as much charge as it should, and he takes full advantage of any lack in fence security to traverse more of the woods besides the ones I provided him in search of acorns or other treats. The rest of the pigs sit inside the fence, wistfully watching the Bacon pig as he searches for treats. They don’t understand why he can eat goodies and they cannot.
As I figure out how to contain the pigs, I continue to work on my flower beds. I expect to sell many flowers both wholesale to florist and also as bouquets to the general public. Check back and on Facebook and Instagram for photos!
