Pig Problems and Other Stuff

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Keely

We had the worst night of sleep in intergalactic history this week. The first time we woke up that night, there was something screaming bloody murder out front. We thought it might be a pig, so we leaped out of bed. I threw on shoes, snatched the flashlight and sprinted down the driveway following the shrieking sound. The sound stopped, and I turned back, illuminating the porch where Sean stood half-dressed, barefoot, and loading a shotgun. I turned the light on the pigs and they looked at me with expressions of porcine consternation. They were piled like sausages in their little shelter, wondering why I’d disturbed their slumber. I guess the screaming was a rabbit or something in the claws or jaws of some predator. We went back to bed.

The second time we woke up, there was a quiet murmuring coming from the kitchen, a quiet, British-accented murmuring. I sat up. There shouldn’t have been anyone in my house aside from the snoozing Sean beside me, and there certainly shouldn’t have been anyone British in the house at all. I shook Sean awake, alarmed, and he coolly rolled out of bed to silence the clock radio in the kitchen.

Nights here are usually not peaceful. There are always owls and coyotes in the woods, and often an armadillo or two will trundle by under the bedroom window in the night, making as much noise as a lawnmower or a small marching band as it rustles through the dry leaves. Sometimes the rain will drive sideways through the open windows over our bed and soak us awake, or the lightning will rattle the windows. What we don’t usually get are human disturbances like the BBC world news.

It rained a lot yesterday. Sean has threatened to go all Army Corps of Engineers on the hill behind the house to create some kind of drainage system that doesn’t require an ark.

antediluvian back porch with Chunky the raccoon

Postdiluvian back porch. My shoe floated away.

The raccoon that has been raiding our back porch has friends and/or family accompanying him to the buffet now. We’re going to have to start keeping all of our feed in the house, which blows. The varmints are cute, though, and it’s cool to see them out there, fearlessly growing ever fatter on our dime. Tonight, we heard squealing out front and went to check on the pigs, only to discover a raccoon brawl in a treetop beside the house.

We’ve outfitted the front porch for relaxation time. It’s not perfect, but watching the storm from the couch last night was pretty exquisite. I love the smell that soaks up from the ground when it rains and the rumble that starts underground with each thunderclap, and climbs to rattle the windows. We’re warm and dry on the porch, but only just.

we donated this homestead basket to a friend’s silent auction

We’re facing some pretty serious challenges with our pigs right now. They seem to have no respect for the electric fence. We peeked outside about half an hour ago, and they were in the garden. They had dug up all of the corn that Sean planted this week, completely ignoring their new boundaries. They’re fearless when it comes to the fence, and we’ve got video of them hopping over it like fat little gazelles. It wasn’t an issue until Sean moved them this afternoon, but now it’s a front-burner concern. They’re loose right now, and we’re hoping they’ll independently decide to hop the fence back into their pasture. If they don’t, we’re kinda screwed. They’re too skittish to herd and not hungry enough to lure anywhere. I’m glad we don’t live near a major roadway or have any nearby neighbors with aggressive dogs, but I’m not thrilled at the idea of letting them have their way with our gardens.

pigs on the loose

pigs in the garden. Oh boy.

Update: Night is the best time to deal with unruly swine. They just want to sleep and they don’t see especially well. We were able to rebuild the fence around them while they huddled together in a pigpile. After a long week of teaching, building an electric fence in the dark is an excruciating exercise in patience. The wires tangle up in the shadows, your flashlight dies, your partner mutters threats under her breath and you can’t quite make out whether they’re directed at you or at the errant hogs. You slip in the mud and pig shit and discover new crimes (they’ve dug up the onions!) every few minutes. It’s awful. I don’t recommend it. Electronet, here we come.

I am so ready for some pulled pork sandwiches.

Hard Work

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Keely

On Saturday, Sean and I got up and started working at 8 am. We didn’t quit until 4, unless you count a break for lunch and to entertain some guests. We cleaned out the chicken house (think Augean stables) and set up the little chicken family in their new digs.

This wire cage is partitioned, so the chicks can move freely between the halves but the big chickens can't. The idea was that Freckles could come and go through the open top, but the chicks would have half the cage to themselves so that they could be safe from the big birds. Unfortunately, Freckles shoved her big chicken self through the tiny doorway, so now it's just kind of a tiny cage for the silly bird.

This wire cage is partitioned, so the chicks can move freely between the halves (chick food and water go in the covered half) but the big chickens can’t. The idea was that Freckles could come and go through the open top, but the chicks would have half the cage to themselves so that they could be safe from the big birds. Unfortunately, Freckles shoved her big chicken self through the tiny doorway, so now it’s just kind of a tiny cage for the silly bird.

We built trellises for the peas, started planting a flowers and forage project in the chicken yard, tilled and weedwhacked around the upper garden, washed, dried and folded two loads of laundry, and planted salad. We’re just sitting here now, trying to study up what we can do now to show the world that we ain’t afraid of hard work.

Sean made a pork sirloin roast for lunch. It’s from the pig’s lower back, just above the hams.

I don’t know how that man does it, but I will never let him go. With the pork we had our first garden salad of the year and some sweet potato fries with sriracha mayo. We ate on the porch, enjoying the breeze and the quiet, drinking in cool water and the pleasant, quiet shade.

check out the cool garden to-do board Sean hung for us!

Days like Saturday, I wouldn’t trade this for anything. Sweat was beading on the sunscreen behind my ears and the plane just above the unscratchable spot on my back was sunburning anyway. I’d been working since I woke up and could have worked until I dropped and not finished everything, but I was splitting my dimples all day.

We left home around four to head to the Juke Joint festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi. I loved it last year and I loved it this year. There aren’t a lot of events that celebrate Delta culture and heritage, so Juke Joint is special. The way Clarksdale lights up one night out of the year reminds me of the Magic Toy Shop pop up book I had when I was a kid. There’s a lot more beer, crawfish and guitar at Juke Joint, but the mood is the same. ‘Nuff said.

In a total change of scenery, on Sunday, we went to the Orpheum to see Ballet Memphis’ Peter Pan. The Orpheum is a beautiful old theater in Memphis; it’s all chandeliers and gold and silver paint. The show was magical. The ballet and the flying were seamless, and the fantastical, dreamlike mood of ballet suited the story perfectly. I’m still working on understanding the language of dance; a dance party will go on for a while and I’ll lose the plot, fail to understand what the dancers are saying with their movements. I’ll get there, or maybe I won’t, but I’m trying.

On the way home, there was an emergency weather alert on the radio. It’s that tordado-ey time of year again. Sean asked “do you think they make these announcements crackly and use that creepy automatic voice to give these announcements a scary, doomsday kind of quality?” I’ve never heard them that way at all. I grew up thinking that the robot voice was a guy named Noah. When I hear weather radio, I just assume I’m on a boat adventure and that Dad is there, looking out for me. I might be about to get wet, but I feel safe and exhilarated and salty. Thanks for bringing me up on boats, Mom and Dad.

The sand bar at Little Pickering, summer 2002 or 2003, probably. The Larson was my favorite boat, or maybe we just had my favorite adventures in it.

The sand bar at Little Pickering, summer 2002? The Larson was my favorite boat, or maybe we just had my favorite adventures in it.

Off Pond Island, summer… uhh… 2002?

Farm Chores Friday

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Keely

High five! You made it to Friday!

Tomorrow night is prom night (roaring 20s themed) so all of my students were wild to be in the cafeteria “helping” to set up. It didn’t help that the weather was perfect for languor at a picnic table, and all I could think about was napping in the sun. During my 8th period prep, I had several students just wander in and start chatting. Their classes were doing prom prep or their teachers had given up on accomplishing anything and let them roam free. I have a page-a-day bananagrams puzzle calendar, and A challenged me to a race to see who could finish a puzzle first. I took him up on it, since I have a considerable backlog of puzzles. I love seeing kids focused on hard problems just for fun, so A made my day. We tied. After the race, I showed him my post about Freckles and the chicks, and we talked about blogging.

“What is a blog?”
“Well, you write stuff, and other people can read it”
“Do you only see stuff that your friends post, like facebook?”
“kinda, but it’s more about writing than reading, like a cross between facebook and a journal”
“could I have a blog?”
“anybody can have one. It’s easy.”
“What do you write about?”
“I write about school and my garden and critters”
“You write about school?”
“You would too! You spend all your time here! You’d probably write about your horse, too, snap a picture and be like ‘check out my horse'”

Meanwhile, a couple of other kids came into my room and walked out with the pizza boxes that were sitting on my desk from the reward party earlier. They walked out again with the big stack, marched over to the gym and announced “hey y’all, we got the refreshments.” They retreated at a dead run when their deception was discovered.

A, if you’re reading this, because you totally heard me tell Erwin the name of my blog, you should totally start your own. You are an awesome guy, and I’d like to read about whatever it is that you think about life and school in Palestine, Arkansas.

When we got home, Sean and I decided to move the pigs. This involved taking down and setting up the electric fence, carrying the heavy and bulky shelter, and chasing a rolling metal water container down the driveway. When it was all ready, we had to catch the pigs. The first one, Daisy, was easy. We corned them just outside of the chicken house, and Sean was able to grab her as the other two ran away.

Daisy screamed bloody murder for what felt like hours as I tried in vain to corner one or both of the other two, who were becoming more and more agitated and wary as the screaming continued. Sean was afraid to leave Daisy in the new pasture because of Raccoon-Eyes’ escape attempt last spring. I chased the pigs around and around the chicken yard, lamenting the use of piggy calories for galloping instead of bacon. Sean finally had to trust Daisy to stay put and come help me: Levi and Sizzle refused to be cornered.

I had tried the flying tackle and the sneaky step. I had tried soothing talk and herding them into the enclosed chicken vestibule. Nothing was working. Finally, Sean thought of a hog panel, and I grabbed one of the metal gates that was left in our carport when we moved in. We were able to use that in conjunction with our cunning and speed to capture the other two. I ate some dirt.

I am not nearly as serene in this victory photo as Sean is above, but that’s because I probably ran a mile chasing those critters while he was babytalking Daisy down in the pasture. Humph! At least poor Sizzle isn’t screaming her head off in my arms.

All three pigs are now happily snurfling in a fresh green pasture, and the chickens are grateful to have their yard back. So far, they seem to be doing fine with the electric fence.

We watered the garden today, and I can’t believe how big everything is already. The brassicas (left) have grown enormous almost overnight, and it won’t be long before we’re eating garlic scapes.

Check it out! Strawberry shortcake, here we come.

We decided to leave the chicks in the nestbox tonight to give Freckles one more day with the fourth egg. Chicks can survive a day or two without food or water on just their yolk juice, so they’ll be okay until morning. We’ll move them down tomorrow to the enclosure that I devised. I’ll explain it with a photo in my next post.

The Blue Door

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Keely

Spring is the right time to paint your door blue. I worked on things today that might have felt frivolous in the summer or fall: I cleared the poison ivy from a long-neglected rose bush, cut and arranged three kinds of daffodil, and painted my front door. I napped in the sunshine with my belly to the sky and I walked through the pasture to the house next door.

The daffodils still come up in the spring along each straight edge of a long-gone path to the steps. Who lived here once? This house and ours are close together by country standards, and similar in design. In the present, our nearest neighbors are a mile on either side, but this house is the last ghost of something of a neighborhood. The occupants must have been friends or kin to the Lyles, the original owners of our place. Did they work in each other’s gardens and picnic in the pasture together? Did they borrow this and that and forget to return it and eventually forget who it belonged to to begin with? Did they fight and feud and make up? Did their kids play together in the woods? There are stories in the short, pretty walk across the pasture.

Spring is a season of thresholds. Everything is on its way to being something else, and everyone is on the road. A couple of friends rolled in late on Monday night and were gone in the morning like the last frost. We have other guests right now too, though these are less welcome.

The ladybugs sound like a heavy rain, smacking their bodies against the windowpanes to reach the sun. They drown themselves in our tea and crawl up our legs at night. Sean claims he pulled one out of his pocket at school the other day. They get into our towels, and, when I got out of the shower this afternoon, I accidentally crushed one against my body and choked on its sharp odor. I think we’re going to try vacuuming them up and letting them go in the garden.
The garden, too, is on its way to being something else. It’s in that phase just before everything springs out of the ground in spades. The lettuce is growing slow now, but it’s eager, and the more it grows the faster it will become. Plants are wonderfully exponential.

When Sean got home from school, we gardened. He tilled while I raked, and we each took a turn mulching the aisles with straw. I planted cabbage, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower starts from the feed store, and we tucked in a row of onions together.

screen door swings the breeze
halfway through this blue doorway
laughing with goosebumps

Spring Saturday

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Keely

I’ve been wanting to paint the front door since we moved in. It’s going to be blue for luck.

Sean made bacon, eggs and cornmeal pancakes for breakfast while I worked on the door. The smell of bacon frying made me smile. Spring is really here: I worked all morning with the front door open and a chill breeze blowing dust out of the corners of the ceiling; there are flowers coming up under the tree where we slaughtered Pinkie last fall, and the hennies are laying five eggs a day. We can’t keep up with production, so if you’re an Arkansan, we’re selling homestead eggs for $3 a dozen. All proceeds go to chicken feed.

Smells: bacon frying, rosemary oil snapping out of dry twigs as I cut away the dead, lemongrass and rot, fresh mint lingering on my hands from pulling out dead stalks and discovering new beneath; exhaust from the tiller as it roared and pulled. We planted coneflowers, hollyhocks and bachelor’s buttons. Lettuce and peas are sprouting now, and the quince is flowering.

There are a thousand
things I should do
buttons to button
not frilled with blue
practical things
in a practical queue
things without ruches
in that coneflower hue
but despite all the things
that I really must do
there’s nothing I’d rather
than plant flowers with you