Curriculum Planning

We're in a bit of a lull in the garden, or maybe I'm just taking a little break, so I have time to start looking at the coming school year.

Here's the thing for those of you who have never done it, it completely fries your brain. It's sort of like braiding, except what I'm trying to combine into something beautiful is concepts and schedules and needs and extras. I really would like the children to do a poem every day, but I've realized my follow through on this is good maybe once or twice a week. Instead, I'm going to just share a poem I like daily and then assign them their own to work with once a week. I have now written out twelve each for Ezra and Phaedra. Sylvie will not be writing out whole poems, and I want to model writing, so I'll write things for her to copy each day.

Ezra wants to study Latin and Phaedra wants to study French. I feel pretty comfortable presenting Latin, as not too many people will notice how poorly Ezra pronounces things. The French is daunting. I might just mention here that I am pretty fluent in German and we're making some progress in that department, but Phaedra feels adamant about French. Now, I have to figure out how to cover three foreign languages and find a language program for one I cannot parse. I'm thinking we'll do German the first term, Latin all the way through, and French the second term. What we figured out last year is that the third term is the wrong time to do foreign language; we all just don't care by then.

I also still like to work a few Waldorf lessons into each term, so I want Ezra to do physics and Phaedra to do Norse myths and Sylvie to do form drawing. These are lessons that require my soul energy to be interesting and that gets pretty intense when I want the three kids to have at least one good, deep lesson along these lines each week. I get antsy trying to imagine what it will look like.

Then, there's all the reading they do for the Charlotte Mason thread that winds its way through our school day. That part is great for all of us, but I feel like I let follow through slide too often. I see pretty clearly with Ezra when he has grasped a topic, but Phaedra is more like I was and just reads to check it off her list. She really does not bother trying to understand unless I ask a few questions that engage her; she is all about finishing. For Sylvie, I'll have to do all the reading for her, as well as present her other lessons.

Let's not forget math. We use a program that I feel very good about, but sometimes, a page might require a great deal of help and guidance. I feel certain I'll figure something out, but my skin itches as I imagine all three kids standing at my elbows demanding help RIGHT NOW with their math. Probably the first order of business will be to work on taking turns and not interrupting.

I've decided to do twelve weeks the first term, and ten weeks each of the other two terms. This works pretty well with the weather and garden and vacations and a nice long break at the end the first term. The year is stretching before me, and I'm not yet chomping at the bit. Still, despite my anxieties, I feel that thrill of the school year unfolding.

Sometimes

I get really sick of the sound of chicks peeping.

I think I might scream if one more no-see-um bites my laboring arms during milking.

I want to lie down in the pasture and never get up again.

I really doubt the use in trying to get food out of the ground.

I want the cow to just eat what there is and be happy about it.

I don't want to read another book to anyone.

I want the dishes to wash themselves.

I want the grass to quit growing- at least around the house.

But, mostly, I live a most wonderful, awesome life. I never could have dreamed that most days are so full of beauty. Mostly, I'm getting better at remembering to have fun, playing catch, watching the children's gymnastics stunts, staying in the pasture and watching the clouds until the urge to move pushes me from the ground and back to the task at hand.

Execution Date Is Set

August 5. That's when the man will come and kill Chappy so we can put her in our freezer.

I am very pleased about the meat, but I'm a little sad to kill our rotten, fat calf. It seems I'm confronted on all sides with the killing I do in order to grow my own food. (And for all you people who do not eat meat, just free yourself from the delusion that no killing was done to bring your food to the table.)

I kill potato bugs by the hundreds. I kill their larva, I crush their eggs. I kill them daily. I squash them and have their guts on my pants and glasses. I know how potato bug blood smells.

I kill cucumber beetles, stalking them in the early morning when they're sluggish and easy to catch. I kill cabbage moth caterpillars. I kill Japanese beetles and the little tan beetles that are not Japanese beetles.

I kill the spiders that build webs in my house, I encourage the cats to kill mice, I celebrate the dog's mole-killing endeavors.

And now, we're discussing which chickens to cull and when to kill the meat birds.

Really, I'm going to keep eating meat and I'm not going to let the potato beetles eat the potatoes to the ground. The Japanese beetles and tan beetles may not eat all the rose buds before they open or all the leaves from the plum trees. The cucumber beetles may not make lace of every leaf on the squash and melon plants. So, I guess I'll get back to the business of murder.

Decisions, Decisions

How should we manage the chickens? We strongly believe that they are healthier on fresh grass, moved as often as possible. Right now, that means every other day. I also like to have two roosters, but that means two cops that have to be moved. Each coop is in its own stretch of electric fence and each fence is hooked to the energizer we have for the chicken fence. This fence is separate from the energizer for the cow fence because poultry net is a major drain on an energizer; there is just so much of it to ground out.

The problems with this system are myriad. It is hard to move the chickens that often. It is a bother to move that much fence. The chickens really can destroy/enhance a bit of pasture in under a day, and our pasture has a slow recuperation time. If I seed behind the chickens, one inevitably gets out and eats the pasture seed- very expensive chicken food. A trailer based chicken coop would make the whole thin easier in some regards, but then we would need the tractor to move it, and we do not use the tractor often enough to make that seem "easy".

Another way to manage the chickens while still providing them some fresh grass would be to have a permanent coop, or even semi-permanent. We could situate it so that  different doors could be opened on different yards, meaning each yard could regenerate between times the chickens were on it. That sounds pretty good until I remember that our grass takes a long time to regenerate. Also, that would mean devoting a fairly large area just to chickens. I'm not sure I want to do that.

We could have a permanent coop with a smallish yard that we managed like a straw yard; we would keep the bare dirt that would quickly form covered with bedding. To provide some ranging time, we would let them out very late in the day so that they would not range far and could not do too much damage. That also sounds pretty good, but the cost of bedding adds up, and at some point, we'll have to spread that bedding as compost. It seems a bit silly to not "spread" it the way we already do, by having the chickens deposit their manure right where we want it- on the pasture.

As for genuinely free range chickens, they are amazingly destructive. They scratched blueberries last summer right out of the ground in their attempt to dig through the mulch. They eat an inordinate amount of broccoli leaves; they like to taste tomatoes. No one likes to have chicken poop on their front step, and the chickens like people; they will most definitely decide to hang around the house at least some of the time. And a free ranging chicken may lay her egg anywhere and roost most anywhere.

I'm not sure what we'll do, but those are the options. There's a good chance we'll stick to our current system until our backs give out and we're forced into some other method of managing them.

I Was Thinking of You

I find it funny, and a sign of my age, that so many daily tasks are accompanied by a memory of a person I have little or no contact with; sometimes they're dead and sometimes they're just lost to time. Still, it's funny.

For example, I spend MANY hours mowing; I use a tractor, a lawn tractor and a push mower. I am mowing my yard and I am mowing behind the cow and I am mowing to control seed heads in the pasture. As I mow- every single time- I think of the grouchy neighbor who lived across the street when I was growing up and I think of the boy I liked in junior high. They both said that if my family would just mow the yard, it would get denser and we would have a lawn. No one had the emotional space to do that when I was young, but now, I keep hoping they were right. I keep hoping that if I mow that pasture, it will get denser.

I have thought of these two people so many times since I started trying to be a grass farmer that I keep thinking, "I should write about that." Then, yesterday, another ghost of memory haunted me.

I was spraying diluted milk on the back pasture. I did it in May when the grass was just coming on; that's supposed to be the best time, but I don't figure it'll do any harm now and we're awash in milk. It's a slow process, but kind of pleasant. I have a borrowed pump style sprayer. So I put the diluted milk in the sprayer, then I pump it, then I spray and walk a little, then I pump it, then I spray and walk. It's quiet, it's nice to focus so much attention on the pasture to see what's actually happening, it's nice to be outside. And, it looks like it has indeed increased the density, but I'm sure it hasn't hurt anything.

There I was, lugging that two gallon sprayer, moving slowly down the hill, and I paused at the fruit trees. I thought, "What the hell- TK said his grandmother put milk on the leaves of her plants," and I sprayed the trees. Then, I could see Mrs. Bullard, my 9th grade English teacher, with her stillness and her bustle and her metal sign she shook for the thunder in MacBeth. I could see her frustration with TK, who always had something to add and whose essays were always too long. The happy memory accompanied me for the rest of my work.

Life With Tractor

The thing about the tractor is that we always are looking for ways to use it. The farm is small enough that the tractor is in a marginal area of usefulness. Usually what happens is I say, "We need to do this job," and Jason says, "Let's use the tractor!"

So, the other day we were taking the bedded pack material from Chappy's stall. Throughout the winter and even most of last fall, we did not clean out her stall; we just added bedding on top of it leaving it to compost in place. In case you are not getting a clear notion here, that means heaps of packed straw and hay.

Jason thought the tractor was the best way to move it, and he had a good point. The bedding is heavy and if you could lift it out with the bucket, you might be saving your shoulder for another year or two. By hand, the bedding had to be thrown into the back of the truck then gotten out of the back of the truck and into the pile. The bucket meant you could lift and dump.

The problem is that you cannot really get the tractor into the barn, much less into Chappy's 7x10 stall.

Plan B was to move the bedding by hand (manure fork) from the stall to the bucket and then drive the tractor with the filled bucket to the dump spot. However, it took two of us a solid half hour to fill the back of the pickup with manure forks. It took me about five minutes to fill the tractor bucket all by myself. I hope that gives you some sense of the different volumes involved.

Now imagine our very sandy soil and a piece of big equipment, either a truck or a tractor, driving back and forth however many times it takes to empty the stall. Obviously, the truck is much more efficient when you consider the number of trips necessary.

And while we were working all this out, we detached the rough cut mower from the tractor; if you haven't done this, then you have no notion of what kind of exercise in frustration it is. We are not sure if we're just incompetent or if tractor implements are deliberately exasperating so that your sense of accomplishment is met before you even turn the tractor on. We wonder if either of us knew diddlysquat about tractors or grew up using one whether we would know the magic trick to getting the mower off and on the PTO attachment and hitch. We have learned that there is no finesse and a sledgehammer comes in handy.

Sadly, when Jason was moving the tractor so that the detached mower would not look abandoned in the middle of the field, he ran the bucket into the barn wall. He did not even manage to poke the hole into the part of the wall that would have made cleaning Chappy's stall easier.

Once the wall was fixed and the mower detached, we abandoned the idea of using the tractor and were able to use the pickup truck to remove all the bedding with time left to bathe before we went on our date.

Not So Sentimental

No, really, I'm not. Occasionally, though, something will just hit me.

Jason and I went on a date the other day. We had had a few lovely hours of finishing sentences and quiet interludes. We were headed home and driving through a resort town.

In Vermont, not only do pedestrians have the right of way, but there are signs everywhere reminding you of this fact. Add to that that Vermont drivers mostly seem more polite than other driver stereotypes I'm familiar with, so they notice a person waiting to cross, and they stop. All of this is to say that on this idyllic, late spring evening in a town bursting with out-of-state vacationers, traffic was moving very slowly.

There was a family of four waiting to cross. The children were probably 14 and 17. A cluster of people just in front of them crossed, but they hesitated. So, we stopped completely and maybe even waved them across. They stepped quickly from the verge and the mother swept her hand back and down- you know the gesture. But no one took her hand. Then, she glanced down at her hand in confusion as if she wasn't quite sure what she was doing, and they crossed the street.

My own hands suddenly felt so empty.