Twin Oaks Farm - Day 3

What a long day today was. Up at the usual time and breakfast of the usual three scrambled duck eggs, bread with TwinOaks own jam and coffee then off to feed the chickens and ducks. The ducks are cool to watch sometimes, they do everything together and sometimes follow one another around in single file like a happy small marching band ... quack quack quack. The property has a pool with a disabled pump and the ducks have reclaimed it as their communal bathtub, every morning they dive in together, dip their heads and shake to distribute the water over their backs, pluck this and that out of their feathers and then climb out and meander over beneath a large oak tree and finish cleaning and grooming themselves to get ready for the day, all together , their sense of community just struck me. Every night all 26 of them go together into their coup and they build a nest out of grass, in the morning there will be around 24 eggs in a single group .... everyday.
My next task is to round up all the empty feed bags and cut off the bottom and then cut them open and lay them out flat. Renee is somehow going to use them in the raised garden. There are lots and lots of bags, I think the last intern was here many months ago and Renee has been overloaded since then trying to drive her one woman show. The two car garage is used as the feed storage and food storage, inside is a commercial walk in refrigerator and then next to that is a small feed storage cage made of chain link fence with a locking small Renee size door that I can barely squeeze myself through, inside is a large pile of empty bags and an ever diminishing pile of full ones. Tomorrow I take the van to Dolton, Alabama to pick up more feed from a freight forwarding center, the special organic feed comes all the way from Virginia. The rest of the garage is used as storage for various "stuff" and the "stuff" has been accumulating for a while, with the bag chore complete my next task is to remove all the "stuff" out onto the driveway for sorting and then stored in it's proper place when Renee returns from the dentist's office. She has been complaining on and off about a tooth ache, made and appointment and then broke it after the pain went away and then called this morning to see if she could go in after all, long story short she came back less one tooth. While she was away I started the next task which is to clean chicken and duck eggs, one stinking egg at a time and there is about a weeks worth of eggs in the commercial fridge, not to mention that the duck eggs are laid on the ground, in the mud and they are a pain in ass to clean. Well, to be honest it's not a pain to clean just one, but it is to clean 24 per day times 3 or 4 days worth .... and that's just the duck eggs. But this has to be done to get ready for the farmers market in Panama City on Saturday. I get one bucket finished before Renee returned from the dentist and then while we are discussing her tooth adventure two farm tractors come up the driveway, it's already very late in the afternoon so these guys must be on overtime. Finally the 20 or so acres of hay are going to be bundled. About a week or so before I came a local farmer was hired to bail the hay, so he first cut it all down and then disappeared to do some other task. Renee has been trying to get this guy to call her back or something to let her know what is up, then yesterday he called and said pretty soon. Finally we will be able to move the portable chicken coups to a new pasture area, the hangup with the hay was forcing us to keep reusing the same square and frankly that area was getting pretty shitty, literally with chicken crap everywhere .... there will be some very green grass in that area in another month or so. After a brief discussion with the two drivers we return to finish the eggs and then have dinner at about 7:40 .... frickin long day.