Farm Fatalities: a cold-blooded killing and three blind mice

This week was my fourth week on the farm. And last weekend it poured for 36 hours. I didn’t even leave the apartment on Sunday, yet Monday morning I somehow felt like I got cheated out of my weekend. I was completely unmotivated.

It may have something to do with the fact that Chris was up in the barn, above us, working for an hour in the middle of the night Sunday night. One o’clock to two o’clock. And it was pouring. And rain was dripping down our wall. At 2:00am when Chris made it back in, he was so bothered by the rain he started shuffling all of our electronics and books across the room. It was just a long weekend; a weekend of driving rain and chores and not as much sunshine as I’d like.

Chris killed three mice on Friday while digging out around the greenhouse. They were burrowed underneath some soil; underneath a row cover about two feet beneath the dirt. Chris took a shovel and just beat them, and somehow all three of them died. They were pretty mice too- a silvery gray. Shiny like the moist arched back of a dolphin. I called them moles. I know mice are not good for our plants, but they were just doing their thing and then “bam” a shovel hit them on top of the head. I guess some days are like that. I assume the three of them weren’t blind, but they sure did run.

Announcement: The baby chick that was born last week died during the weekend storms. (photographed above) The mother hen was not a good mother. She nestled down in the pasture during the first few sprinkles on Saturday and for some reason just decided to wait it out. I guess she just gave up after about 24-hours of driving wind and rain. No sign of the baby bird Monday, and by Tuesday I had completely given up the search. I’m regretting turning down the offer to raise a baby chick. Farmer Thomas told me that I should take the chick and raise it as my very own. “It’ll follow you anywhere. It’ll be a loyal pet.”  I’d have made a better mother than that dumb fowl.

Many of our pepper plants are looking puny and sad; plants that have been in the soil almost a month now. The germination rate has not been great and they got overly dried out. Now they are damping off and dying. This week we potted on almost all of both the hot and sweet peppers: Big Bomb, Flavorburst, Highlander, Inferno, Jalafuego, Fatali.  Several, however, didn’t have any root left, so I simply tossed them into the big pile of dirt outside the greenhouse.

And then there’s the feral rooster that decided to burrow down at night, right in front of our window. He doesn’t crow at 6:30AM like all the other roosters, initially he decided to start his bellowing at 5:30AM. Then he went ahead and bumped it up to 3:30AM. Chris received approval from Farmer Thomas that he may indeed kill the rooster by any means possible. There are way too many roosters on this farm. The hen to rooster ratio is not so great. Chris whacked the rooster over the head Thursday night with a board. I made him go out three times to make sure it was really dead. Unfortunately, roosters do not make good eating.

More barn cleaning all day Friday brought out two more skeletons. Have I mentioned the skulls and skeletons we continue to pull from the barn floor?  Shoved between insulation and straw and massive beams we’ve found all sorts of dead things. I think this is where the barn cats have brought there most handsome kills. I’m still not sure what the largest of the skulls is: opossum? raccoon? rabbit? The lumber will be delivered Monday and if all goes as planned we’ll have a new barn floor (well, the half we’ve been repairing… the other half was replaced last summer) by the end of next week.

And I finally asked Thomas about Oscar Wilde, the cat that we met during our first visit to the farm in February for our interview. We’ve seen three other cats, but no sign of Oscar Wilde. Chris tried to convince me that I had remembered the cat’s name wrong. Thomas said Oscar Wilde got ran over by a car prior to our arrival in March.

Thus is farm life: storms and winds and driving rains will change your plans and keep you awake at night. Animals will die. Plants won’t make it. There will be carpentry projects that I will hate. This is only the beginning. I know it will be harder when deer eat the lettuces and birds pick all the blueberries and the tomatoes have hornworms.  And I do realize the piglets Chris and I will pick up next week will be butchered.