You might’ve guessed it – long days of manual labor don’t lead to evenings of leisurely writing about the day’s activities. Most nights we don’t get around to dinner until after 8pm, and not because it’s in vogue or we’re on schedule following a lengthy siesta. It just doesn’t happen any earlier, despite waning daylight. In lieu of a daily record of farm happenings, I offer this instead – observations of an average day on the farm.
7:15am – Wake up and hit snooze until 7:30 or so. The sun isn’t emerging from behind the mountains until after 7am now, so there’s little reason to get up earlier. Morning showers are a luxury reserved for Sundays, so by 7:40 I’m in the kitchen drinking coffee and saying hello to my farm parents and fellow farm-hand, Marshall. We root around for breakfast, which usually involves lots of our free-range eggs and toast, and whatever vegetables are lying around from the previous day’s harvest. Right now that means peppers, which seem to make their way into every meal.
Hungarian Hot Wax peppers (not for the faint of heart)
8:15am – Marshall and I usually split the morning animal feeding, which consists of two groups of chickens, two groups of goats, the dogs, the donkeys, and the sheep. The main goat herd lives down hill on the other side of a creek and are typically ravenous by the time we get to them. Some of the goats’ horns are chest-high on me and come close to knocking me over when I’ve got a 15lb bucket of grain on my shoulder, so I usually leave this job to Marshall (a full foot taller than me) and head for the main crowd of laying hens, whose rolling houses are currently far out in the fields in front of the house.
The walk out to the chicken houses
When I reach the chickens, I have to disengage and open up an electric fence we’ve been putting up at night to discourage foxes from evening attack. The chickens need about 20lbs of grain to supplement their insect & grass diet, which I shovel out from large trash cans that are carted around the fields with the chicken houses. Once the chickens are busy eating, I set to work cleaning the nests that line the roosting houses. In the past few weeks we’ve found that adding fresh cedar to the nests each morning (and removing whatever nastiness has been left overnight) produces cleaner eggs that require less washing in the evening. I don my gloves and scoop handfuls of chicken poop out of the nests and replace the bedding as needed. In the meantime, I usually collect a half dozen eggs laid by the earliest risers in the flock.
Opening the chicken fence (the grey-blue birds are guinea fowl who seem to think they are chickens)
8:45am – After feeding the chickens, I compost the dirty bedding and take the eggs into the house. I head out to feed our three donkeys and clean up the barn where they spend their days. After a night of grazing in the fields, it’s hard to imagine they’d be hungry, but the donkeys are so thrilled at the prospect of grain that they make these obnoxious shrieks that sound something like a hyperventilating horse. It’s loud and shrill, and is apparently the way donkeys express excitement. I don’t love it.
Sadie & Rosie, eager for food
9:00am – The last group of animals I typically feed are the chicks living in the front yard. When I first arrived at the farm, this group of chicks was only about two weeks old. They were tiny and adorable. Now, six weeks into my farm stay, their fuzzy bodies have transformed into small, sleek chickens. Soon they’ll be big enough to join the main chicken flock, which means another round of night-time chicken transport as they desperately try to return to their previous home in the front yard.
The chicks on September 9th
The chicks on September 23rd
The chicks on October 13th
9:15am – If it’s a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, the end of morning feeding signals the beginning of a long day of berry picking. On Mondays raspberries are picked for freezer storage, to be later made into various jams. On Wednesdays and Fridays the berries are picked into market boxes (plastic half-pint clam shells) for sale at the Saturday farmer’s market in Charlottesville. I don’t know how many rows or acres of berries are on the farm, but do know that it regularly takes 12-16 hours of picking to cull all of the ripest berries. Thankfully, I share this work with one or two other day labor berry pickers (who drive 35 miles each way to earn $8/hr at this job – what a different economy from San Francisco!) Berry production has slowed in the past few weeks, but the raspberries will continue to make new berries until the first frost.
Caitlin in the thick of the raspberries
3:00pm – Afternoon activity varies widely. Some days are devoted to weeding, while others are spent planting fall crops (mostly salad greens), harvesting squash and other veggies for the market, or doing general farm maintenance like mowing, fence building, or moving animals from one field to another. Last week we spent an entire day chain-sawing and wood-chipping a giant hickory tree that fell over onto a fence during a storm a few weeks ago. Other recent projects have included enlarging the netted enclosure for the front-yard chicks and constructing a device to keep Charlie, the sheep guard dog, from chasing the sheep.
The hickory tree before it was dismantled
Swiss Chard, before a major weeding project
Swiss chard you can see!
Charlie & his PVC "device," which slows his ability to run
6:00pm – Collect & wash eggs, put the donkeys out to pasture, and continue with afternoon projects until it’s too dark to see or you just can’t work anymore! Most days I end up clocking 9-10 hours with an hour out for lunch.
Washing eggs
I help with dinner and the dishes, sometimes am elected to erect the chicken fence, which must be done after dark when the chickens have gone into their houses for the night, and disappear to my room for my first alone moments of the day around 9:30pm. I shower off the day’s dirt, but am usually too tired to do much more than read a few pages in The Earthcare Manual, a book about permaculture techniques or knit while watching an old movie.
My bedroom in the farm house
