Sunlight sparkled on the Shubenacadie River when I looked out my window on Friday morning a week ago. The cherry tree was in full bloom, looking like snow had fallen overnight.
I had fun going out there into the clean world to milk the cow. The sky above me rang with birdsong. I had to step over several fences to reach Cinnabar the cow. Caleb was filling up her water trough, so she stood there near the water while I milked.
The day the boys moved the broiler chicks outdoors, some of them escaped and needed to be rounded up.
The boys’ voices came to me across the field as they did their chicken chores. There were shouted instructions and the sounds of buckets. I’m sure the chickens are happy to be outside in the fresh grass now.
We ate breakfast together after the chores were done. Then everyone scattered to their different jobs. Dad went out the door to check whether the garden was ready for planting. Mom started on some schoolwork with the younger boys. Selema scrubbed laundry. Judith skimmed milk to make cheese. I washed dishes, and Jesse cleared the rack for me while he waited on Dad to come back with further instructions.
I had been thinking of making a batch of hand cream with fresh chickweed and other herbs, so after the dishes I went to my room to see what information I had on the subject. That was when I decided that first I needed to know whether I actually knew what chickweed was. I looked it up in a book—and it looked quite different from what Dad had said was chickweed. So I asked him about it. We spent a little while checking the internet for information, till Dad needed to go back to his work on our farm website. I looked a little longer in a few of our wild herb books.
A truck rumbled up the driveway. “Will you look after that egg customer?” Dad said to me.
I met the couple on the porch. “Do you have any free-range eggs today?” they asked.
“Oh, yes, we have plenty right now. How many would you like?”
When I was finished serving them, I decided to go outside and weed the hyssop. Selema and Judith were already weeding one strawberry rows.
Close to noon, Mom called us girls inside to prepare lunch; when it was ready, the family gathered at the table. As we ate, we talked about what needed to be done this afternoon: weeding, planting a few pawpaw trees and a schisandra vine, and getting ready for market. Then Dad explained some points about soil biology.
After the meal, I went upstairs to my room for a while to pack the soap for tomorrow’s market. I turned on the tape-player and listened to hymns while I cut apart labels and sorted out the soaps that I needed for restocking the farmers’ market box. The humming of the lawnmower drifted in the window. I looked out. Selema was in the front lawn, mowing with vigour. A short time later there was a sputtering sound; the mower had run out of gas.
Selema poked her head into my doorway a little later. “Oh, this looks nice!” she said.
“What looks nice?” I asked, pulling a soap bar from a box.
“Soap and music,” she said.
“Oh, yes, it is nice,” I said.
“I had so much fun getting my hands on that lawnmower,” Selema said as she turned to go again.
When I was finished with the soap, I came downstairs and found her scarifying tree seeds for planting. She rubbed the big seeds over a sheet of sandpaper to nick the seed-coats so that they would germinate more easily. There were pawpaw, bayberry, honey locust, and Siberian pea shrub seeds that we wanted to plant in flats.
Caleb came into the dining room. “I almost feel like not going to market tomorrow,” he said as he draped his person over a chair near the table.
“Why?” I asked. Usually everyone wants to go to market. What could be the trouble?
“Dad said that the field will be dry enough to work on,” he said,
“Today?”
“No, tomorrow, and I would be allowed to disc harrow it but I can’t if I go to market!”
Later in the afternoon, I headed outside again to the perennial herb and flower patch, crossing the rows of cardboard and hay mulch that the boys put down for the new strawberry and gooseberry plants.
Just before I got to the hyssop row I had been working in, a creeping weed caught my attention. Ah, so we do have real chickweed, I thought. That weed certainly looked like the chickweed pictures we had found earlier.
And then I weeded the hyssop for the rest of the afternoon. My sisters worked on the strawberries.
These days full of outdoor work make everyone eager eaters. Supper was accompanied by talk of the planting we hoped to do the next day, among other things.
After the meal, Dad and Jesse hurried to the computer to take part in a Q&A with the permaculture course they’re doing. The rest of the boys headed outside to do the chores. Judith went with them to stand in for Jesse. Selema grabbed her pail to milk the cow. “Mom, may I wash the dishes first and get the chives for market later?” I asked. Gathering chives isn’t a bad job; but I don’t like coming in to a pile of dirty dishes afterwards. Mom gave her permission, and cleared the dish-rack for me.
When Judith came inside again, carrying the pail of eggs, she informed us that helping with chores had been exciting. “When we were moving one of the poultry shelters under the fence,” she said, “I was afraid it would touch the electric fence. Caleb told me to push and he said, ‘Just trust that I’ll keep the fence up!’” We keep the poultry in the same pasture as the cows, so when it’s time to move the shelters the boys sometimes hold up the fence with the power still on, and push the Cackellac shelters underneath.
Jesse is planting hazelnut bushes.
After the dishes, I picked up a bowl and scissors; off to the chive patch. The boys were coming back from the pasture as I snipped, and the younger ones’ voices rang across the field. “Here we go round the hazelnut bush!” they sang. We just planted a number of hazelnut bushes this spring; so hopefully in a few years those will be producing.
My bowl filled, I went back to the house and bunched the chives. I tossed the bad ones into a bowl for a salad the next day.
Selema and Judith came in the door with buckets of flowers. There were flowering quinces, tulips, and daffodils. “Are there no cherry blossoms anymore?” I asked.
Judith’s flowers were nearly falling out of the bucket. “They’re gone!” she said, looking down at her bucket and trying to hold in the flowers so they’d make it to the table. Selema rushed over to help, rescuing a quince branch just before it fell to the floor.
In the middle of all this, I thought Judith hadn’t heard my question, so I asked it again. “They’re gone,” she repeated.
“Oh, so that was the answer! I thought you were talking about your flowers falling.”
After a few more odd jobs, we were ready to wind down for the evening. The sun set behind the trees, ending another ordinary spring Friday on Bountywoods Farm.