Howdy! We’re currently at our third and final WWOOF farm – Green Flamingo Organics, in Oak Hill, Florida. We don’t have any internet access at the farm, so updates will be late and sporadic.
I’m going to try to write them up on the laptop though, and push then out when I can get to internet access (we came into town (New Smyrna Beach) today for a farmer’s market, and we stopped in this sweet little surf-themed coffee shop for a bit of caffeine and computer time.
Things remain wonderful, but very wet – it’s been rainy for the last couple of days, and for quite a bit before we arrived – despite this being the traditional dry season in these parts. Fortunately, we cam prepared for all weather, and have been happily harvesting, planting, and preparing produce in our raincoats and rubber boots.
More soon, but wanted to at least let people know we’re alive and very, very happy out here. Love to our family, friends, and friendly strangers!
Monday, February 3rd
leaving The Chastain Farms
Winterboro, AL
old ‘silage pit’ once used to feed cows – Nathan would love to bury a school bus in it someday …
We woke up and fed the Chastain animals for the last time, and then got moving all our stuff out from the Milk Barn, into our van and trailer.
bringing the pigs their daily slops
pigs harassing their new bovine pasture-mates
Then we all took a field trip across the road, back to the Lodge – this time to get a tour of the upstairs, where Old Man Joe had been working to rehab the historic structure. It was full of old donated junk, so we had a good time picking through it all, but the coolest thing by far was the 8-foot tall bird nest in the wall – made from generations of birds adding new material annually in a tall narrow space between the wall joists.
The nest towered over us, and reflected when the neighboring lands were changed from wilderness pine straw to cultivated wheat straw, decades before.
When we returned to the Chastain Farm, we were all packed, ready to roll, and were a bit ahead of our planned schedule .. but it just felt wrong leaving without helping the crew get the high tunnel greenhouse ribs assembled and put up. We’d helped dig in posts, level posts, re-level them repeatedly, cement them in, drill and attach multiple layers of toeboards, etc – days of work, but with almost nothing to show for it … and it had gone so smoothly putting up the first, test rib with the full team cooperating to align segments, screw them together, and hoist them up and down into place.
So we dug out muck boots back out from the trailer and went back out with the farmers and the SoCal WWOOFers to raise the roof.
The crew worked quickly and efficiently, dividing the labor into sensible chunks without any one person leading – the project just carried itself along and we rapidly had all the ribs screwed together on both sides and ready to move into the receiving foundation posts we’d worked on all week before the snow came.
It had rained intensely the previous night, and the tilled, loose soil within the perimeter of the high tunnel had become a thick ooze, ready to swallow the unwary.
We built a bridge from extra 2x6s, allowing the group that was setting the post on the far side of each rib to make the crossing without going down like Atryeu’s horse.
Once we’d finished the build and the obligitory celebratory photography, we said our goodbyes, once again hoping they were “see you laters.”
We had loved our time on the farm, and would miss the good people we had met there, the endless Kool Aid, the woodstove chimney pipe made from scavenged tomato cans, the amazing junkpiles bursting with potential, the cyclical rhythms of animals and old men.
branded by the DIY stovepipe
We’d loved playing rustic aestheticians, practicing farmyard feng shui, bringing utility and rough beauty together. We had learned much from their selling of various value-added goods, from bouquets to preserves.
decoration we left behind in the WWOOFer bunker bedroom
But it was time to move on, and go southward, sunward. Onward to Florida, the sunshine state!
The temps rose as we dropped deeper southward – by the time we reached our destination (our friend Chris’ place in an RV park in Tallahassee), it was dark.
We ate some “mater sandwiches,” talked with Chris for a couple of hours, and called it a night relatively early, wanting to get rested for the next two days of recreation and relaxation in the Panhandle.
Sunday, February 2nd
The Chastain Farms
Winterboro, AL
It finally felt WARM when we woke up; 53 degrees! I was up earlier than usual and witnessed something only the early birds witness – Old Man Danny feeding the feral barn cats. There had to be at least 10 of them – with several free-ranging chickens intermingled among the roiling horde that followed Danny, Pied Piper style. It was a wonderful sight, and I was so delighted by it in the moment I failed to get a photo. But trust me, it was sweet.
Speck, Cleo & Widget chilling
A few days earlier, seeing how we’d fixed up the bathroom with junk from around the farm, Rachel had made a request – that we create some kind of boot rack, for rubber muck boots to be hung upside down on. (They were currently scattered around the ground outside of the kitchen / Milk Barn door.)
We’d been keeping out eyes peeled for days for something perfect. But nothing really seemed right, and the things that somewhat appealed were off limits for re-purposing.
But we were now in our final day at Chastain Farms (whoa! that snuck up on us both), and nothing had worked out yet. So, while Nathan & Kimm worked with the SoCal crew on finishing the gate project, we set out to build a boot rack, somehow or another.
There were some big weathered posts in a pile out on the edge of the woods, but we weren’t sure how to assemble them into a rack. There was a pile of bamboo poles that had some promise, but again, nothing came to mind for how to bring them together. I thought maybe a roll of wire fencing would work, with them sticking up and out at an angle, with one boot hung on each … but when I brought some of the stout poles over to see if anything clicked, it just seemed like a mess to build, that it would take up too much space, that it would tip over unless it was anchored deeply into the ground, etc.
my belly took this while I was walking with my camera around my neck
And then we asked Kimm where the rack should be located – and realized it was on the concrete pad by the kitchen door, so whatever we built could not be sunk into the ground for stability at all.
So it was back to the drawing board – or really, back to the junk piles. But wait .. when we moved the underutilized shelving unit from the spot that the hypothetical boot rack would live, we found a metal gridded frame, once used to imprint a pattern into fresh concrete. And we discovered that at about a 30 degree angle, boots would hang nicely from the spaces – narrow, smaller boots in the vertical slots, and larger men’s boots in the horizontally-oriented ones.
All it would need is some kind of frame to hold it securely in place … we didn’t want to just use 2x4s or something boring and ugly like that. So we walked out to peruse the junk piles for the perfect something.
What we wound up using in the end is visible in the picture above, but we didn’t get it on the first pass through – we went through here, and back to the Tool Shed (not to be confused with the Tool Barn), finding nothing. Walking back, we found a heavy red steel rack that seemed perfect – until we got it back and leaned the grid against it, and found that although the angle was perfect, the metal red bars were slanted such that they blocked access to many of the potential boot holes.
So we decided to use the cool old cash register thing we’d admired in the steel junk pile – drawer frozen open, rusted all over, beautiful and shining with character, and likely originally used in the old Chastain Grocery store.
attaching the 4x4s
We chose a nice length of weathered old barn board for a shelf at the top and two salvaged white-painted 4×4 posts (matching the weathered paint of the door), and screwed it all together, with scavenged rusty washers, to avoid unseemly shiny new bits. The rack sat in the edge of the drawer and leaned back at the perfect angle – all it needed was to be secured at the top somehow.
An old horseshoe tacked down with a couple of corroded old nails did the job with style and grace.
freestanding, sturdy, and made with all farm-scavenged materials
After the others finished work on the gate, we walked the perimeter of the huge pasture, trying to determine where the fence was grounding out, resulting in no electric shock action surrounding the pigs and cows.
It took awhile, but eventually Jimmy and I found and fixed it up in the woods, where a sagging line was contacting a grounded line.
When that was fixed, we drug the aluminum rib pieces out of the weeds, and assembled the first of the arched ribs that would support the plastic of the greenhouse, and tested out the first of them.
Billy photo bomb!greenhouse rib raising at Iwo Jima
It was Superbowl Sunday – we ate dinner over at Kimm’s while folks half watched the commercials and slightly watched the game.
After we got home, rather than going to bed, we decided we had to fix just one more thing in the bathroom – the shower curtain was held up with a couple of unsightly, if functional 2×4 chunks with white PVC cap pieces. Kimm had mentioned that she had wanted the curtain rod to be located up within the doorframe, rather than inside the room – and Kristin had realized that the rusty “cow kick stop” (which we’d found but not used for the pot rack project) would make a perfect curtain rod holder.
So we got a flashlight, and took a walk out through the slippery mud to find the drill, back by the greenhouse. (I know it was slippery, because I totally fell down in it and got my pair of just-washed jeans coated in mud.) Then it was quick work to take down a trim board, cut the curtain rod down to size with a hacksaw, mount the cow kick stop and the rusty old hook with some washers, and install the new rod in its rusty new home.
Saturday, February 1st
The Chastain Farms
Winterboro, AL
Today marked the halfway point of our working honeymoon; we’re one month in, with a month to go before we start working our w.ay back North.
We woke up to the news that one of the horses had somehow escaped the pasture, and was in the garden. Although there were no crops for her to devour, there were rows of plastic mulch that did not withstand heavy hoof traffic well.
We lured her out of the garden by freeing the other two horses and leading them past the gate toward the chicken coops, where the sweet feed (for Blossom the old nag) was kept.
A loudly-shaken bucket of this feed got them to follow Nathan back to the gate to their pasture … but no further. They knew where he was taking them and they were more interesting in somewhere new.
This worked out fine since the plan was to move them to the massive, wooded pasture area, where the Camphouse and little pond are located – leaving the cow pasture open to move the pigs into.
rustic wire graffiti
Cleo walked behind the big alpha-female Appaloosa as we secured the gate behind them, and learned that horses kick, the hard way. Fortunately, it was a light kick – knocking her over but not hurting her any,
Once the horse situation was under control, Nathan led the SoCal WWOOFers in a project to tear down a superfluous segment of fence. Kristin and I started on the next phase of toeboard work – a second tier of boards beneath the first, on the side with the massive gap between the ground and the bottom of the boards, due to the slope of the land.
This meant more drilling through the galvanized posts.
We started on the side with the largest gap with 2×6″s – staggering the gaps as needed, connecting sections in pairs, then mounting these pairs onto the drilled posts, and connecting them to their neighbors with the same splice boards we’d used to connect pairs. As the land sloped and the gap narrowed, we switched to shorter 2×4″s.
The work on the 2×4 section took two trips out to the Camphouse – the first time we returned empty-handed, convinced the 2×4″s we found there were not treated for outside use.
Then we were told they were, in fact treated, so we took a second beautiful walk through the mossy, towering forest.
For lunch, Kristin made venison, corn, & sweet potato tacos, for us and Rachel and the two kids.
After we wolfed that deliciousness down, we helped get the project started to add a gate to a corner of the field adjacent to the just-removed fence, permitting equipment to be driven in and out.
For this to work, we needed to run an underground insulated wire from one side to the other, for the electric fence.
So Kristin dug a trench, while Nathan and I pulled a bent old steel fence post from a pile of similarly used posts, selected due its long straight section. I used a diamond angle grinder to easily cut the piece down to size, taking a selfie as I did so.
The post would be used to protect the buried wire, six inches beneath the roadway. But not yet – we still needed to find and install hinge pins to the existing fencepost, add a new post, mount the gate, wire the fences to the wire, etc. And it was dinnertime, so we closed it up in a temporary fashion, to be finished tomorrow.
clearing ice from Blossom’s water
After dinner, I scavenged a long spring from the milking stalls in the Tool Barn, and upgraded the newly-faced bathroom door so that it would swing shut automatically; it was a simple, minor thing, but it gave me joy, and I found myself opening the door for no other reason than to enjoy it swinging closed again.
Friday, January 31th The Chastain Farms
Winterboro, AL
We woke up and fed the animals – discovering that in the night, a marauding beast skulked into the chickens and slaughtered one of the golden gang – the recently-free-ranging crew of roosters that we both loved, as they were used to humans and would follow us around at times and get up close.
The head and neck were completely gone, while the body was left behind – a sign that the predator was probably an owl or an underachieving raccoon, which are both known for this kind of kill.
Then Kristin and I worked together to install the first course of toeboards to the high tunnel construction, while Nathan did some computer work for his job and the other WWOOFers built a lean-to type shelter for the pigs.
Since we’d buried the pre-drilled holes down into the concrete, we first had to drill new 5/8″ holes in each of the 26 galvanized posts at the same height. This took quite a bit of force.
Kimm came down and helped us work.
When the sun was getting low in the sky and our efforts were completed for the day, we headed out for a walk to check out the creek on the edge of the farm’s woods.
lichen-covered poison ivy vine
To end the day, we walked across the highway to the Plank Station Lodge, where Joe (of the Coffee Shop Old Men tribe) served as President and groundskeeper. They were having their popular annual Spaghetti Supper fundraiser event, and we were all invited. The people were friendly and talkative, dinner was comfortastic, and the desserts were incredibly delicious, especially the 7-Up Pound Cake, which almost caused a riot when Joe’s grandaughter intercepted a thrown piece Jimmy tried to throw to Nathan.
