Rethinking Lifestyle

It is a misty Manitoba morning and I like it that way. I have been to exotic locations but give me a prairie morning with a meadowlark greeting me with her rhapsody of song and the smell of the earth in the air and I will be content.

The raspberry plants that were so cruelly assaulted by the frost in early May are making a comeback. They are being very cautious, and their tentative buds are slow to emerge but there is a sign of life in most of them. I gave them another watering as the soil felt barely moist at root depth. I looked up the soil moisture status on Manitoba Agriculture’s website http://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/weather/steinbach-cc.html and found it to be only 17.8% of field capacity which is as low as it has been in many a spring. Our rainfall this spring from April 1 to now is only 43% of normal.

The garden has been planted and the transplants, especially the celery is looking quite limp on hot days. They need a bit of watering help until their roots explore the soil on their own. The peas and beans are just starting to poke out their heads. The carrots are always tenuous as the seeds are so small and they need to be seeded close to the soil surface where it is quite dry. The trick will be to hoe the weeds without inadvertently intruding into the carrot row. The corn and onion plants look like little soldiers all in a neat row standing up straight. A good emergence of cucumbers and squash promise good eating by late summer.

I turned the cows out onto a new pasture today. The grass is not as big as I would like to see but they are getting impatient waiting in the yard, eating dry hay when they see all that beautiful green on the other side of the fence. I let them in and then put up a cross fence of single strand electric wire to limit them to just part of the pasture. I will allow them another new space in a week. They were quite frisky with all that space and needed to test the fence. Fortunately, I had just turned on the power and they learned to respect that boundary. The light rain this morning helped make the fence very effective. With such low soil moisture and dry conditions, it has been difficult to get a good ground to complete the electric circuit.

Last fall I planted a lowland pasture blend of grasses and clovers around my house with the intent of not having a lawn to mow but letting the cows in periodically instead. The stinkweed and a few other annual weeds forced me to do one mowing now but hopefully the perennial grasses and clovers will take over and allow me to let them grow enough to be interesting to the cows. I intended to put in fence posts around the house this spring as the ground is usually so soft that a press with the front-end loader on the tractor is enough to push in a fence post. Not so this year. I may have to drill some holes.

The weanling pigs are expected to arrive this week. I look forward to their presence for three reasons: they eat the kitchen scraps that are so plentiful in the spring and summer, they rototill the ground for next year’s garden and they provide bacon and farmer sausage to be enjoyed with perogies and peas next winter.

The chickens are quite shy this spring. The door of their coop is open to the cow pasture, but they prefer to stay indoors so far. Perhaps when it gets hot they will prefer the shade outdoors.

I wish I were a really good farmer – one who knows every member of his orchestra and directs, knowing the gifts each brings to create the symphony of interconnectedness that is a farm. I am not that good, so I shall practise what little I know in the knowledge that each member will practise their own giftedness and I will, by observation, recognize it.