Farming by the seat of your pants

Things had been going swimmingly with the chickens until Thursday, when a steady cold rain had descended upon us.  Around 5 I went to check on the chicks and noticed the heat lamp had gone out.  We replaced it with a 150 watt bulb but it wasn't the same.  Scrambling, we located a neighbor with a spare bulb, which also promptly blew out.  Not knowing what else to do, we brought the whole brooder inside for the night, where they stayed until the next day.

We solved the problem with the lamp and brought the brooder back outside, no mean feat.

Today we were going t plant our tomatoes, which have grown leggy of late and really need to get in the ground, but tonight's temperatures are supposed to plunge down to the 30s, an observation of NOAA's we're not sure we believe, given their history.  Still, ideally the temperatures don't go below 50 once our tomatoes are out.

There's ideal and then there's reality, of course.  We only have limited time periods in which to do things, given my other job, the one that brings in money.  So we'll end up compromising and planting the beans and the corn instead, hoping that the night time temperatures will be stable by the time they pop up and that the soil temperature isn't too substandard for them to germinate, and that our tomatoes won't grow so potbound that they'll fail. 

There's certainly plenty to do, more work than there are people, and that's not counting the household chores.  Ironically, we're so busy trying to grow our own food that we haven't had time to go shopping, hence there's no food in the house, forcing Lionel to go foraging in our back field last night in search of young milkweed shoots.  Last week, it was nettles, and the week before, brook trout and fiddleheads.

So far, the farm hasn't run away from us so fast that we're unable to catch up.  But it's certainly taken off, and now we're just along for the ride.