Magic Beans

This morning I put up a fence to keep the chickens out of the heritage seed garden. Made with orange plastic "caution" fence the kind with long squared off ovals. It only covers the front side but the chickens aren't keen to venture around the high-tunnels that way. They may still get in. As I am doing this the girls are in Fabio right next to me cutting in a new bed. Using hoes they are ripping the soil apart six to eight inches deep. Okay, the soil is already dead so who cares? I try and use a pitch fork to break up the sub layer without complete disturbance, where I have worked gets gone over with the hoes anyway. I'm not in the mood to defend my case about soil that is already dust bowl bound. It gets quite hot in under plastic quickly, and without water I'm suffering. Meg comes by with a Sicilian squash that is about four and a half feet long and curled up into a circle, it is slug over her shoulders like a championship title belt. She has also collected a jar full of tomato horn worms, and I mistake them for beans. It is startling when I see them move.

Speaking of beans we are headed out to harvest dry beans. These are not long bean pods that you eat, the seed inside is what we are after. The beans them selves are pink in the dragon tongue variety, and others are black and white that were called Calypso in the seed catalog which look like Orca whales to me, some others that are magenta colored but might be mistaken for a regularly red bean although I don't think they are as typical. Down the rows we go, filling a lug to the brim with them. Selective breeding and color theory give us beans of plenty.

Lunch is interrupted by Fred asking us to unload some hay and straw from a large trailer that has arrived to fill an order that Kristen has made. We all go out and pull down the many bails of straw out in the field waiting for Fred to bring us pallets, he watches from a far. The straw will be used to mulch some rows. Then the truck backs up to the cow barn to unload the hay. Hay is for horses. We all jump on the back, my first hayride on the farm, perhaps the last. There are some pallets but not enough for all the hay, many bails end up stacked outside. The bails are not too heavy but I am working up a good sweat trying to keep up with Meg who decides to carry two off the trailer each trip.