Twin Oaks Farm - Day 7 & 8

Tuesday, Nov 24, Day 7 - Same old morning routine, breakfast of three scrambled duck eggs, toast and some tea, I dumped the coffee idea due to the acid reflux reaction which by the way is completely gone except when I drink coffee .... did I mention that? Today we have more clean up to complete from Sundays processing. The heavy pieces of equipment are still in the yard next to the commercial kitchen and we have to get them back in the barn for storage. First we take care of the feeding which is rapidly turning into dull routine, but is also taking less and less time and collect the duck eggs which is showing some improvement. For the last two mornings we have been getting 25 eggs from the 26 female ducks, up from 24. Hopefully this will keep improving to 26/26 which will mean 100% efficiency out of the ducks and maybe that good karma will manifest into their neighbors the chickens. Recently we had 42 eggs out of the 100 or so laying hens, which is not a good showing .... gotta figure out what the problem is with that light coup!! Too bad there isn't a way to monitor each hen to see how things are going, some kind of implantable chip or something ... hey I know, the government could send out a record keeper that can follow the chickens, one man for each chicken to see what the hens are up to all day! Bingo, the unemployment problem would be fixed, just convince the Chinese to loan us the money to pay the guys ....
After the feeding is finished Renee has to go in town to the post office and assures me she will be right back, then we can proceed with putting the heavy stuff away in the barn. A recent image of the barn pops into my head, as barns go I imagine this one is on the small size, about the size of a skinny two car garage with a large double door on the front, but size isn't the problem. I remember taking a brief look inside when I first arrived and then each morning when I get the riding lawnmower to carry all the feed down to the pastures, but it's like my memory isn't working properly. I can remember the lawnmower at the front, but then the rest of the image fades into black, like the rest of the barn just fades away into some kind of black hole, but I do remember thinking in my head that it needs to be cleaned out. Since Renee hasn't returned from the post office I decide to jump right in, but first I go to the bed of my truck and retrieve my special tool, my large push broom from my storage unit, yeah, compared to that whimpy kitchen broom this will make short work of the sweeping part of this task. The joys of life I suppose. I proceed to the barn where the doors have partially closed, open them up wide and look around near the door for a lite switch and shazaam, there is light. The place is totally cluttered, not a super mess but every square foot of the floor is covered with empty cardboard boxes, old plastic fences probably from some old chicken fencing idea, lumber and pvc piping laid out on the floor in the way, a pallet just laying there in the way, another pallet with a single bag of mulch, a bag of wood chips used for the chicken house where they lay their eggs, a little bit of this and some of that but all pilled in together, and it looks like she forgot it's all here. The poor woman is overloaded like you can not imagine .... Ok I think, this won't be too bad, I don't have to clean out the whole thing, I just want to make life a little easier to get the heavy equipment in and out. The first thing I decide is that a big, awkward, loose pile of cardboard boxes is going to stay where it is, and since I've made that decision then lots of other stuff can go on top of it. About half way into it Renee appears and explains that she arrived at the post office before they were open and decided to just wait it out, she is pleased with my undertaking and asks me, "There is lite out here? Where is the lite switch" ........ 30 minutes later I have perhaps 40% of the total floor area uncluttered and all the stuff piled into semi organized groups, cool, now I can sweep the floor and get on with storing the processing equipment. After everything is put away it's time to move on to the compost piles. When she went to the seaside farmers market on Saturday she stopped at the restaurant in the Hilton resort and picked up 5 large trash cans of compost material, which consists of leftover fruits and veggies, the peelings, the part of the pineapple nobody wants, etc etc. This stuff is gold to an organic gardener/farmer and it's free if you take the time and effort to pick it up, kind of like biodiesel which is always in the back of my mind. So we gather up the required handtools, two pitchforks, two shovels, a yardbroom for raking leaves and take them to the compost pile area at the back of the property behind the barn, then one at a time I drive the riding lawnmower over to the van and Renee dumps the cans into the trailer. Back at the compost pile Renee comments that the pile we started building last week has "decomposed" and has shrunk in size about 4 - 6 inches, my untrained eye roams over the pile and I come up with "if you say so" as I can really not tell a difference. We remove the cardboard over the top and set it all aside and then take the pitchforks and start spreading the "veggie mix" over the entire length of the 7' pile then move to the adjacent dysfunctional smaller compost pile which smells just terrible and is infested with bugs and ants, and spread that material over the top of the fresh veggies. We do this with all the material from the resort and alternating with the bad compost then she sprinkles some lime and we top it off with one more layer. Renee decides she doesn't like using the cardboard, it holds in too much moisture and asks me what I think we should use. I recommend some material I came across in the barn, it's built like a tarp but is woven in an open manner to allow it too breath, so she marches off to retrieve it while I finish using the flat nose shovel to scoop out the last of the veggie mix fluid from the bottom of the trailer. We get that pile covered and she decides to do the same to a large compost pile that was started some time before I arrived. This pile is enclosed in a funky white plastic fence which is meant to keep the chickens out and is covered in cardboard that has been decomposing in the sunlight and rain etc. She hands me the cardboard one piece at time and as we get down to the second layer we see ants roaming around, little red ants that look to me just like little black ants, just red instead. She warns me about their presence while handing me the cardboard and I have to lift it up and over the fence and while doing that the ants roam down my arm to beneath my tee shirt. I'm thinking this is not a big deal you know, little ants that are red instead of black, what's the difference?? Well, the difference is how the little things BITE, so now I'm throwing the cardboard down and trying to sweep all of them off of me and considering ripping of my shirts to make sure, but alas I get them all. Now I have about a dozen of these little bumps, like a mosquito bite but smaller, harder and redder and I think they are going to be with me for a while. So we get the composting work finished and now I have to clean up all these white trash cans really nice because they are going to be near a kitchen at a Hilton resort and Renee has had complaints before because her interns didn't get them clean enough, so I'm sure to do a good job. After that all the plastic bowls, pails and buckets used to store the guts, feathers, the blood and whatever else need to be cleaned once and then a second time with a chlorine solution to get them sanitized and then stored for the next run. While I'm doing that Renee is in the yard working in the chicken coup that we had placed the tarp under, she is scooping up all the chicken guano and putting it in a large bucket about 30 inches in diameter, very smelly but this is another form of gold at an organic farm, chicken poop is actually something that can be sold to gardeners/farmers because it is a natural heavenly fertilizer. Instantly in my head I start thinking about a way to make a coup with a floor that would make it easy to collect the poop .... I'll have to put some time into this when possible, there has to be an easy way to come up with a workable solution, so I'm thinking. It's about 3:00 in the afternoon and all the outdoor activity for the day, other than the evening feeding which is done just before sunset, is complete, now it's time to go inside and can you guess the activity waiting for me .... you got it, clean eggs. The mp3 player is making a big difference, the time goes by much smoother and I don't feel the ache in my back as badly, more on that later. I finish up all the mornings duck eggs, this evenings chicken eggs and two small buckets of duck eggs that were being stored in the commercial refrigerator in the garage. Talk about an energy pig, this industrial fridge is mounted directly on the concrete floor and when I put my hand on the outside surface it feels like 40 degrees or so .... can you imagine the energy needed to keep that thing cold in the heat of the summer? Yikes, now I'm curious to see the electric bill for the entire operation but not sure I want that kind of shock, after all I'm still dealing with the physical shock to my legs, arms, back etc. Eggs are finished, it's around 6:30 and time for dinner. Tonight is a delicious mushroom pie and some tea from this morning. If you're thinking about the recipe for the mushroom pie then make a mental note, I'll post it as soon as I can ask her after the Thanksgiving break. Off to a long hot shower and some blissful sleep by 10:30.

Wednesday, Nov 25, Day 8 - Half day today, so we just feed the birds and ducks without letting them out since Renee goes into Tallahassee for a farmers market held in the backyard of the Foreign Legion post at Lake Ella Park. The park and lake are an old camping ground with old brick cabins that have been converted into business's such as a bike shop, kite sales, that kind of thing. It's a pretty nice setting, sort of perfect for a farmers market. Bobbie and Fred Golden of Golden Acres Ranch also sell their lamb and goat meat here and Mary who helped with the processing on Sunday sells her organic produce as well. I first met Renee when I was helping Bobbie take some livestock to the processor in Esto, a small town north of where Renee lives. We stopped by and visited on the way back out of town and Renee mentioned an organization called WWOOF, which stands for worldwide opportunities in organic farming, their website is http://wwww.wwoofusa.org , then we met again when she came to the Lake Ella event at the beginning of the month. After reading all the wwoof entries for Florida and seeing that most farms expect about 30-35 hours per week from an intern I thought I had an idea what I was getting into and then at Lake Ella I asked her what she expected and she said 15 hours per day 8 days per week, so I thought she was joking ..... and technically she was because it's been around 10 - 12 hours per day for 5 days a week, so now we can all have a good laugh, hahaha. Anyway, I'm learning left and right and getting in shape plus I see the effort she is putting into making this place work and I want to help her get it all off the ground if I can and of course she is grateful for the help. The other night we talked about the Christmas schedule and she's cool with me taking whatever I need to get up to North Carolina and back so I kind of made a commitment to be there into the new year. By then I should be in better shape and down more pounds ... right now I'm sure I'm feeling better, I'm just not feeling it yet, my poor body aches everywhere ... let's take a survey from the bottom up, the ball of my left foot feels tender as if I bruised it, both achilles tendons are aching, my calve muscles squeek a little, the tops of the fronts of my thighs scream when I squat like on the throne or to pick up something off the floor, knees seem ok and lower back seems ok but my shoulder tops and middle and upper back between the shoulder blades have been screaming since I unloaded all the feed, and get this, cleaning the eggs is pretty simple, you just stand there and place egg in left hand, sprinkle with baking soda and then spray with white vinegar then roll the egg around in the palm of your hand until clean, but my back is on fire at times when I do this. In all everything is ok, but I'm being cautious and on the lookout for trouble when it comes to my lower back, being very careful there and taking no chances. I feel like I've been moving constantly for a week and a half and boy am I glad for the four day break for Thanksgiving.


Happy Thanksgiving Everyone