Barn Spring Cleaning, Cookout Prep

A big week of herd share deliveries. Early Saturday I loaded Amy’s coolers for the Abingdon Farmers Market. Then Carter, Wren, and Leon moved chickens and made the farming rounds with me until time for us to take herd shares to Marion. 

Amy and Hasten moved chickens with me Sunday morning before church. Afterwards, we got a couple hours of riverside rest that afternoon before moving cows across the road and into the barn, then sorting out 8 hogs to load for Monday’s trip to the processor.

On Monday I got back from the processor just in time to help Amy and the kids load coolers for their meat delivery to Knoxville. Moving chickens, moving cows, and cleaning out the trailer the rest of the afternoon for me. 

Tuesday was a spring cleaning day around the barn. With the tractor, I scooped out a winter’s worth of hog bedding while Amy and the kids scrubbed coolers, deep cleaned the on-farm kitchen, and pressure washed our chicken processing area.

On Wednesday, new bedding in the barn. Then setting up more chicken shelters in the field before moving another batch of 3-week-old chicks from the brooder to the field. 16 shelters to move daily now. While I was filling feed buckets, Hallie and Hasten moved 3 shelters by themselves. It was all they could do, but it won’t be long until they can handle chicken chores themselves.

Another batch of baby chicks in the brooder on Thursday. Chores and getting more coolers ready for yesterday’s delivery to Bristol and then Kingsport. Our monthly date night delivery was replaced with a Sam’s run to get plates, napkins, seasonings, and such for our 6th Annual ORVF cookout on Saturday. 

The weather looks questionable for Saturday’s event. As dry as this spring has been, we welcome whatever rain we get. We have 12 ORVF beef briskets thawing, along with about 15 racks of ORVF pork St. Louis ribs, a couple hundred ORVF burger patties, and a pile of ORVF chicken wings. We plan to eat good rain or shine. I’ve never seen the kids so excited. Lots to do today and tomorrow in preparation, but we look forward to a fun afternoon of food and fellowship with this wonderful community that we’re blessed to be a part of. 

On Monday’s trip to the processor, I listened to MARCE CATLETT by Wendell Berry. I love his Port William novels. Here’s a few quotes from this one:

“He said little, thought a lot, watched, listened, and was unsurprised, perhaps by then unsurprisable. You had to know him a while before you recognized the fierceness of his independence…” 

“What came into him then was something he wanted to say, something he would not intend to say until he had heard himself say it. It would be a challenge. By such challenges thrown out ahead of thought, he had acquired without intending or much caring, the reputation of a fighter, one who would fight all day if all day was what it took.” 

“Jim Stedman then felt in his heart one of the hardest of human sufferings, the wish to help his friend more than he knew he could.” 

“He needed to get back from that day’s defeat, as completed as it now was, and take up his work again. He had been defeated, but he was not destroyed.”

“At those meals, nothing store bought came to the table except salt, pepper, the baking powder in the biscuits, and the sugar in the pie. They ate, as the Psalmist says, ‘the labor of their hands.’”

“Andy took their way of life for granted. He did not know how old it was or what it was worth or how threaded it had come to be. He did not begin consciously to honor and love it until he saw it going away.”

“As he has come to know, Andy’s grief for the things that are lost affirms his love for them, as even the loss of them affirms the bounty by which they once existed. For in this world, grief goes hand in hand with gratitude.”

“For him, morality began with a moral fear of wasted daylight, particularly of the morning light.” 

“They followed the only rule of membership: when any of them needed help, the others came to help. By extension of their one rule, there was no ‘settling up.’ All help was paid for in advance by the knowledge that there would be no end to anybody’s need for help, which would be given to the limit of life and strength.”

“In stable and lasting communities, people become neighbors to one another because they need one another.”

Have a good week.

Will