Life on an organic farm is...wet and muddy.

A day old calf ran off into the woods this morning, leaving the Eric’s to search for her and spend a much longer amount of time with the cattle this morning than expected. It’s crazy to think how helpless a human is for the first year of their life, let alone day, and a cow is out running within its first 24 hours of living. She had been resting in the “buffer zone” this morning when they went out to move the cattle. The buffer zone is a 50 foot wide space between the Noel’s property of Maplewood and the adjacent farm. Since that adjacent farm isn’t organic, there needs to be this space. Anyways, so the calf was lying down in the zone, wasn’t with her mother, and just took off into the woods when it came time to move. Eric the farmer had been back and forth a couple times throughout the day, into the woods to look for her, but I’ve just heard word that he found the little runaway. After attempting to run her out into the field, he ended up having to tie her back legs to her head, so that she wouldn’t be able to move, and going back to the 4-wheeler to drive her back. Quite the procedure for such a youngin’! Cows get up off the ground by sticking their necks and heads up and then pushing their butts up, so tying their back legs to their head is a guarantee way of not having them move again on you!

After days of no rain, we finally got a dose of it throughout the past two days. Yesterday, the morning was spent transplanting peppers and eggplant into the ground of the greenhouse, after it had been tilled. These plants do better in a slightly warmer temperature. We also planted marigolds every 6 eggplants, because they help aid in their growth. Jalapeno and sweet peppers can’t be planted close to each other though, because they cross pollinate with each other, so only sweet peppers were planted inside the greenhouse. Then we mulched a variety of already planted vegetables outside with more hay! :0 Gotta love that hay... The wind blew the it up to our faces as we’d transfer loads from a wagon hooked up to the tractor, to our wheelbarrows to the plants. By the end of the day I had a lot stuck in my hair….

Today, we mostly did some transplanting of extra peppers and eggplants into the big field and weeded, leaving our pants and hands very muddy after kneeling in the freshly soaked soil!