Wednesday, January 15th Yokna Patawpha Bottoms Farm
Oxford, Mississippi
Remember how when we were planting peas the other day, we were standing in the mud puddle trenches between the raised bed rows? Today we worked to remedy that situation – or at least prevent it from being much worse when more rain comes. We were tasked with creating drainage for that wet corner of the field, by digging a trench along the edge of the field, and from there, one crossing over and down into the little pond in the woods. We used the dirt we dug up to fill in a few deep puddley mud holes in the fieldside “road” and in the field trenches in that corner.
With four of us working on it, it got done pretty quickly.
Kristin made pasta sauce with some of Doug’s freshly picked garden herbs for lunch, arranged some dried native plant displays.
Betsy came by the farmhouse in the afternoon, and we did some more work on their Facebook and blog websites – testing some targeted paid ads for their CSA signup, and cleaning up some pages of their website.
Tuesday, January 14th Yokna Patawpha Bottoms Farm
Oxford, Mississippi
We started the day in our usual way – with a meandering walk across the field, through the woods, across the creek, along the fields, and to the chicken coop to check for eggs.
The hens are getting older, it’s been cold, several are molting, and food is less rich in the nonharvest months, so egg production has been slow – one to three eggs a day.
Their water dish had frozen over in the night, so we filled up the backup waterer from the pump and replaced the ice block with something the thirsty birds were much more into.
Jeff had a couple pails of pea seeds he’d been soaking overnight, to get their growth kickstarted. I weeded the trespassing grass from the edge-most row of garlic, and we both worked with the other two WWOOFers and planted almost 600 row feet of them – each pea spaced about three inches apart, three pea-heights deep.
The fields feature peaked, raised beds – the trenches between them were thick with sticky Mississippi mud, rich enough in clay to roll up into balls by rubbing your mud-coated fingers together briefly. We were extremely grateful for our heavy rubber muck boots as we splooged and squashed and oozed around the wetter parts of the field poking peas into the dirt.
After lunch, we got more red-oak-splittin’ practice for when we get home to the Que Sehra homestead – Yokna Bottoms will be hosting a concert/potluck/full moon drum circle Friday night, and they’re going to need all available firewood on hand for it. I split most of it while Kristin hauled it to the porch & stacked it in a neat, crisscrossed, well-ventilated pile, to get as dry as possible over the next few days.
The day had warmed up nicely, into the 50s, so we took a cue from the cats and did some sunbathing on the farmhouse patio, laid out on our (New) Mexican blanket, reading and talking with Doug, sitting on the porch steps.
When the sun chilled out for the day, we headed into Oxford with the crew for veggie burritos at the Taco Shop.
Another beautiful day on the working honeymoon adventure!
Today we went to Oxford to “Ole Miss” – the local college, where Doug is a professor in the Education department.
I worked on fixes to their blog and Facebook pages with farm employee Betsy, while Doug and Kristin went from building to building putting up flyers for the Yokna CSA. It was raining on and off – Kristin had a raincoat, but Doug didn’t and they quit after he got quite soaked.
Neither the flyer nor the Facebook squad accomplished all we’d set out to do, but we both got a lot done, anyway.
Later, we wandered the woods, conversed a lot with the other WWOOFers and the farm workers , and then Kristin and I harvested Jerusalem Artichokes from the garden, which she made into amazing enchiladas for us all.
OK, that sucked. I wrote a nice long descriptive post about the 12th and the satisfaction and joys of dusting a huge grey-furred houseplant, but WordPress and Firefox conspired and ate it all irretrievably.
And I’m already days behind posting, thanks to a very spotty and random-access satellite internet connection that tortures me when I try to upload photos.
So instead:
Sunday, January 12th Yokna Patawpha Bottoms Farm
Oxford, Mississippi
Once upon a time, there was a very dusty plant in a sunny window.
Gabe and Kristin decided it would benefit the plant and the room and themselves to wipe off all the leaves with wet rags, and the grey furry plant became shiny and green and they all lived happily ever after, dusting some other smaller neighboring plants and weeding tons of invasive aggressive Bermuda Grass from a few raised herb beds and playing Frisbee golf and gathering dried plants and lichens for decorative purposes and buying a pair of weird thrift store shoes and naming them “Oxford Squares” because the shoes were quite square and bought in Oxford (which features a central Square, incidentally).
Saturday, January 11th Yokna Patawpha Bottoms Farm
Oxford, Mississippi
It stormed throughout the night, and we slept deeply, somehow comforted by the sounds of wind futilely battering the house, and rain sheeting down on the tin rooftop.
“Come see the fog,” Kristin whispered, marking the first waking moment of my day. Fog is beautiful, fog vanishes quickly; I was up, clothed, and out the door within seconds of opening my eyes to her whispered invitation.
before the sun rose and burned it away …
On our way back toward the house, we went through a grove of trees that, the day prior, had hosted a huge flock of some kind of chirping bird. We’d walked across the field toward it, hoping to see what it sounded like beneath such a gathering, but the swarm saw us coming and wasn’t ok with it so they flew away before we could get anywhere close.
Anyway, that was yesterday. Today, we were already in that same grove of trees when the flock came in to roost – they blanketed the tops of the tall trees, and groups took turns dropping down to the forest floor, to drink or to feed.
It sounded amazing.
After breakfast we got to work on the raised herb beds. Three of them hadn’t been planted the previous year and had been overtaken by Bermuda grass. We had to dig up and turn over all the soil in each bed, essentially, and pull out every possible scrap of grass root – any piece left behind would likely grow right back.
Bermuda grass is aggressive and the conditions had been awesome in the boxes – so there was an incredible amount of the tough, stalky root masses to work free from the thick soil. It required a lot of effort – there were ways we worked out to do it better and more efficiently, but no shortcuts to avoid a whole lot of digging in the dirt.
Kristin and I got through most of the first box with some help from Doug, and then Tom From the UK and Jason From Virginia joined us and the next two beds came under control in short order with all hands on deck, so we also cleaned out a bunch of dead plants from the other beds. Afterward, Doug gave me a tour of his permaculture hilltop water reservoir swales, and we all ate warmed up leftovers and freshly baked apple sauce oatmeal muffins Kristin manifested, complete with dried cranberries and banana chips.
Then it was a couple hour siesta until it was time to go to a potluck birthday party – where we ate good food, drank, got bonfired & s’morsed and birthday caked, and played or watched ping pong.
Tom From the UK, Doug, and Jason From Virginia pinging and ponging.
Yep – both parties we’ve been to out here have featured ping pong tables – this one was a lot more casual – just a table out in the garage that had just been given the kids for Christmas. We drank quite a bit of “wassail” – a mulled hot cider drink that everyone but me seemed to have at least heard of before, until I was woozy and sleepy and glad to agree when it was suggested we head back to the farm for the night.
