Wednesday, July 2, 2008
It's finally dark at 10:45 pm. Chicks and ducklings are especially vulnerable to crows and foxes and hawks so as dusk falls we make sure everyone's under cover and warm. The 5 brand new ducklings come from the barn into the house, the 3 newish chicks go from the ark in the yard to the barn, the 10 teenage ducklings go into the ark, and the chickens and ducks tuck themselves in to their chicken house which is actually a stone cow shed with a tiled roof that must be 200 years old. I'm not sure if the floor is made of dirt or rock; I'm raking up the mixed chicken manure and straw on the floor and carting it to the garden and so far I haven't reached what I think is the bottom. Occasionally I uncover a rock which I toss into the corner and there is a small pile collecting there.
Yesterday was so hot and muggy we could hardly move; pulling thistles for an hour and a half was torture. Then what we thought would be a storm blew through last night and it cooled off and rained just a bit so that today was about 60 degrees and cloudy - it was heaven in the hayfield aside from my wet feet. I pulled thistles in the bottom of the field close to the stream, where the wet ground made it very easy to pull the thistles, the mint grows thickly so every step smells refreshing, the water is gurgling by, and the grass issn't as tall as on the upper field so it was easier to walk. I was quite happy down there by myself for a couple hours while everyone worked further up. We had two more WWOOFers arrive yesterday evening and they energetically pulled thistles too so we really feel we're finally making progress. The garden looks good as well since Walt has been planting potatoes and hoeing in his spare time and today Margherita (from Greece) weeded too. The weather today was also conducive to the sheep butchering that K and D had scheduled for 10 am. It all went pretty smoothly I guess; I stayed in the hayfield although I was somewhat curious. Reed watched and told me about it later, and we talked about how it was always sad when an animal has to die so we can eat, but wasn't it good the sheep was happy right up to just a few minutes before it died? Sadder than the butchering was the lamb that died from an unknown cause just the other night, and the chick that drowned in a shallow bucket of water in front of the house last week. Now the excellent mother hen only has 5 chicks to watch over instead of 6. Reed was relieved that the drowned one wasn't his favorite little black one, which he feeds out of his hand and lets sit on his arm.
Ella the goat started getting blood in her milk last week so I started milking her twice a day instead of once to try to keep her from getting mastitis, but she's also got some kind of sores on her udder in several places which seem to bug her when I'm milking. First I tried cleaning her udder with salt water and then I left it alone and now I'm putting olive oil on it to see if that helps heal it up. She's such a sweet girl most of the time, except when she's being an escape artist. Her horns were cut off by her previous owner and she's brown so she looks very much like a deer, and her bleat is very dainty. I'll be glad when her milk clears up completely so we can drink it again.
Walt and I got to walk into the village of XXX just a kilometer away on Sunday before lunch, on a tractor trail between fields and hedges and across the stream, the same one that runs at the bottom of the hayfield. Just outside town on the main road we walked past a large group of senior citizens who had parked their cars on a gravelly pullout under some large trees and who had set up long tables and were having a picnic lunch, right there between the road, the ditch, and the cow pasture. They all nodded at us and smiled in a friendly way when we wished them bonjour messieur-dames and bon appetit!
XXX is small enough not to have its own tiny grocery store, but at least big enough to have a small post office, a bar/restaurant, and a boulangerie/patisserie. We sat in front of the 12th century Romanesque church and ate our pain au chocolat, and then headed back home, only to be hailed by a scruffy looking guy that we'd seen on our way into town on his bike. He had sussed us out as not the average foreigners, somehow, and when he discovered that we were American and not English he invited us in for a drink, in his modest apartment in a large old house in dire need of repair. He didn't apologize for the clutter, simply said we can't expect a man living alone to do the housekeeping. I have a feeling he's one of those tenants that the landlord would like to get rid of but can't, in this land of strong tenant laws.
We sat at the two chairs at the kitchen table while he prepared me a glass of sweet lemonade and Walt a cold alcohol-free beer. His walls were covered with posters and photos, one of him much younger with an accordion, another of his communist father, others of the Greenpeace and 70s hippie variety. First he explained that he didn't have coca cola, and when we said that's okay, we don't drink coca cola, he said, of course, you are normal, yes?; then we basically provided a receptive audience for his views on the ubiquitous English settlers in France, the ubiquitous American culture, the idiocy of the French farmers who spray poison on their fields and who grow GMO crops, the d--khead across the road with remote controlled gates and a video security camera that our new friend likes to moon occasionally etc. etc. He gave us a tour of his lovely organic garden, a mix of flowers and vegetables, let us smell the disgusting smell of fermenting nettle tea that he puts on his crops and he gave us two huge heads of lettuce that we accepted gratefully and ate for lunch and dinner on Monday. We finally said goodbye after admiring his pink and green painted motorcycle, amazed at the interesting people you'll meet when you're not in a hurry on a Sunday afternoon.
