Free days – when the farm feeds the farm.

There is something deeply satisfying about eating a meal from your own land, in a room you created. Home grown, grass fed steak, with asparagus from down the back and hollandaise using my own eggs and butter, a salad from the garden, cheese from Daisy’s milk followed by rhubarb from the garden and home made ice-cream sweetened with our honey.                                                                                      Wonderful. The first meal in the Coupe. It was not really ready for visitors, there was white dust everywhere but we snuck in while the builder had a day off and spent Mother’s Day in there amongst the tools and ladders.

As you know my main objective is to have free days, when the farm feeds the farm, us included. Yesterday was such a day. We fed ourselves and the animals from the fields. From now on we will have plenty of days like this. I note the free days on my calender. I am very proud of these days.

It such an old fashioned thought. I know that the grower thinks I am modern and pedantic growing all this new organic stuff but really I am just old fashioned.

The wind was howling and it was cold.

But the farm fed the farm. A free day.

The more days we have like this the closer we get to self sufficiency. By living within our means we are able to sustain ourselves and not overload the land.

Of course this is not always going to work.  Sustainable is more of an objective than a reality. It is very hard to sustain for long periods of time. There is always something I need from off the farm. But every now and then everything falls into place.

After lunch yesterday, the grower who crops the fields in front of our house, came swooping in with his enormous space ship of a planter and sowed the fields in field corn.    He is also very kindly going to plant me a big patch of NON GM sweetcorn (that people can eat we certainly cannot eat field corn! )  right here by the lane. This has taken some negotiating. He is  annoyed that I am being so demanding about Non GM sweetcorn because there will be weeds! Ah well. I said. I will walk the rows for you. Then he said, what do you have against GM sweetcorn. I just shook my head at the question. Where does one begin. I do it for my health, I said.  And the health of my family and animals. I just do the best I can.  Do you want some honey? and don’t forget your eggs when you come out to plant.

Good morning. In the old days (they were still doing this in the seventies when I was a foreign exchange student here) the rows were a little further apart and once the corn was about 6 inches high the farmers would run a cultivator  behind a tractor between the rows, hoeing all the little weeds. This was precision work.  But they seldom dug up their own plants.  After a while the corn would just shade any other weeds out. The post-mistress was telling me the other day that when she was young (not so long ago) they would Walk the Beans. The local teenagers would work in the early summer walking the soybean fields with a hoe, knocking out the weeds until the beans got big enough.  Even John walked the beans each summer when he was a kid.  They would start early and work until it got too hot then off they would go and buy hamburgers for lunch and have the afternoon off.

I hope you all have a lovely day. I can see clear sunny skies appearing out of the dawn. I do hope that is it for the cold days.

your friend at dawn, celi