Then & Now #11

November 2020, 2021, 2022

I can’t bury the lede that in November 2022 our son was born!

Still, there are many many many cool things to appreciate in Novembers past as well as in this year’s November leading up to the Big Event.

It’s clearly an auspicious month in any year in our Brushy Mountain spur of the Blue Ridge of Southern Appalachia.

With that said, let’s set our time machine for November 2020…

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November 2020

As October transitions into November the fall colors transition to bare trees, and the mountains that surround our farm become visible once again through the naked forest.

To assemble these photo-essays I begin by looking back through my photos from the month in question. What was it that I was mostly photographing? Whatever I was mostly photographing is what I take to be clues to the possible “story” or “stories” for that month.

And secondarily - is there anything that I notice in a photo, now one or two years after-the-fact, that may have been there accidentally as I was composing the shot for another reason but now stands out, triggering a memory or inadvertently showing how something was that now has changed?

In my photo collection from November 2020 the only shot I have that might fall into this second category is this one:

To be honest, I’m not sure why I took this photo. What was I trying to show? I suspect that I was trying to show something that’s not there. In the bare spot in front of the trailer, there was a huge overgrown junk pile, amassed during many farm cleanup operations. I suspect that I texted the photo to Rachael to show her that I had finally cleared the junk pile and reused, repurposed, or otherwise disposed of all the stuff. I freed the abandoned (but valuable) scraper implement from the brambles, and I dug all the little concrete landscaping forms out of the ground and set them aside to use for…something…

This photo doesn’t look like much, and normally I’d have skipped over it in my monthly hunt for “nice” photos that tell the story of our farm. But I’m glad I paused to consider it. It does show how things have changed, and it shows how our long, hard efforts here do achieve modest and incremental improvements.

On the other hand, the main story of November of 2020 according to my bias of stored photos is… Ursa!

I was clearly enamored of my new puppy. As I mentioned in a previous article, she was a “foster fail,” meaning, we were just supposed to foster her for a weekend but ended up adopting her.

Ursa - Latin for “bear.” Because she looks like a little black bear cub, duh.

Rachael’s clinic works with a non-profit that transports dogs and cats to other places in the country where they can be adopted into good homes. Our area has an excess of dogs and cats and not enough adoptive homes. But other places, like the cities of the northeast, have a lot of people wanting to adopt but not enough strays and orphans to meet demand.

Ursa was one out of a litter of 11. Her mom and siblings all got scooped up by the transport and adoption non-profit and whisked off to, I believe, Philadelphia. She stayed behind because she had worms and a skin problem that needed treatment (note how the fur had come off her paws in the photo above). Rachael brought her home to treat her worms and skin issue for a few days with the intention of sending her off on transport, too. But I liked her and wanted to keep her and Rachael said yes (which I am pretty sure she has regretted since…).

Anyway, most of my November 2020 photos are of Ursa looking cute…

…Ursa laying on a blanket

Ursa trying out a too-big dog bed…

…Ursa trying out a different too-big dog bed

…Usra helping me brew beer on an unseasonably warm day

…Ursa hiding in a basket under the coffee table

…and, by the end of the month, snoozing under a chair and having obviously gotten over her worms and started to grow!

Ursa Minor starting on the path to becoming Ursa Major (Ursa Major-Pain-In-The-Ass according to Rachael)…

I might be the only one who loves Ursa, but I love her extra for it.

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November 2021

And one year later…she’s enormous. She’s def not gonna fit under that lil chair anymore. She barely fits in the big chair.

OK that’s enough Ursa for now.

This photo does, however, jog my memory for a storyline with a call-back at the end of this November 2021 section. The chair Ursa is not-fitting-into is a big leather chair that we rescued from one of our dilapidated farm buildings. The front part of what we call “the hunter’s shack” was chock-full of all kinds of stuff. Much of it junk and garbage, but some real gems in there, too. This chair and matching ottoman were such gems. We call it “the baseball glove chair” since it’s like sitting in a giant worn-soft leather baseball glove. It was a great find once introduced to Rachael’s elbow grease to scrub off the mold and restore the leather.

November 2021 also had a few interesting principal storylines as revealed by my photo stash.

One - stunning early November fall colors!

Two - our first hard frost in 2021 came in early November.

Three - farm work at our neighbors’ farming operation and with my millwright buddy Mike was in full swing.

Some views from atop my neighbor’s grain elevator;

Driving the tractor pulling the grain cart during the corn harvest.:

And grain bins galore, working high and working low with Mike AKA “The Grain Bin Troll” (ironically, Mike hates working on grain bins)…

welding an auger connection on the top of a new grain bin…

…and replacing the rotten floor and bottom ring of an old grain bin.

Four - on our own farm it was time for the fall herd health check!

We rounded up the sheep and goats onto the trailer to trim hooves, check for worms, and try to tell if anyone’s pregnant (though it’s pretty early to tell…).

trimming sheep hooves

Alarm! I found an escapee!

Checking for worms by looking at the flesh around their eyes. If it’s pink like Emerald’s here, she’s good-to-go — no worms!

Forrest got into some Spanish needles…

Handsome Moh

Ornery Onion

Once everybody’s checkups were complete they were released onto a fresh new paddock!

What about the pigs? Can’t forget them! How are they doing?

I’d say they are well fed and happily napping away in the November afternoon sun in their cozy straw nest!

Chickens? Ducks? Y’all hanging in there?

Right on, right on, y’all are lookin good.

And lastly, our call-back photo to the one at the head of this section - referring to the rescued “baseball glove chair” that Ursa has claimed as hers.

It came from this structure - the front half of the “hunter’s shack,” which was crammed full of treasures and trash since before we moved in.

We cleaned it out and salvaged whatever treasures we could. Then we called Mike one Sunday afternoon and invited him to come over and help us tear it down.

The back corner of the roof had fallen in, which had caused part of the back wall and floor to rot away. Mike pretty much single-handedly tore the rest of the roof off. I ran around scavenging usable bits of wood and tin, and sorting the refuse into burn-piles and haul-away-to-the-dump piles.

All-in-all we figured we salvaged $2,000-$3,000 worth of materials from taking the front building of the hunter’s shack apart. A lot of it was good rough-cut 2x4’s - like, wood that actually measures two-inches-by-four-inches. So grateful to have this source of project materials! Especially when lumber and building materials have gotten so expensive.

Whew, November can be an action-packed month, apparently! (Hint: foreshadowing…)

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November 2022

OK I won’t bury the lede: —November 2022 we got a baby human comin in hot—

Jeezy Creezy there’s a lot to do to get ready

Such as

Gotta rig up a shelter for our new mower

Good Lord I have got to get that hornets’ nest out of the light fixture

Gotta try to bribe the hateful bird with coins from Ecuador to see if she’ll shut up and be nice and not screetch and wake the baby when he gets here

Oh man we’d better make some instructional videos for our farmsitters for when we have to go to the hospital

Rabbit care - quick and easy! Trust us!

Ok what about the pigs? Easy peasy!

And since we’re so busy how about we kill two birds with one stone?

I’ve been making a video series on pastured pigs and how much land you need for how many pigs and how often you move them and how many pigs per hypotenuse and that sort of sciencey stuff. The video above is part of that series, and the final product was the “Pastured Pigs Starter Kit” produced this month - check it out!

OK - NEXT?!?!?

Gotta move the sheep and goats to a new grazing area where they’ll have plenty to eat and be easy to look after by our farmsitters when this baby thing finally starts to happen!

OK I’m on it!

I’m always evolving my approach to moving animals - trying to make it simpler, more efficient, more predictable, etc. Sometimes it’s easier to round them all up on the trailer, hook up Tulsi (the navy blue 95 Toyota 4x4 pickup) and tow them over to where I want them. Sometimes it’s easier to play games with movable fence netting and see if they’ll just joyfully hippity-hop themselves in the approximate direction of where I want them to go.

So far I have not found a one-size-fits-all approach for every livestock moving situation, probably because there isn’t one.

This month my goal is to get them from our permanent-fenced-in main pasture up the hill through the peach orchard and down the other side onto my neighbors place where there is a great cold season buffet of fescue to munch on.

So far so good.

Alright, alright, alright baby’s comin soon, what else we got to do?

My sister showed up one day with a bunch of stuff for the baby plus a couple of extra does (female rabbits) she didn’t want. OK, cool. Let me whip up a Joel-Salatin-inspired “racken” (rabbit-chicken) barn setup real quick.

Groovy.

My sister also brought a small haul of jack-o-lantern pumpkins left over from Halloween that she got for free. Let’s cut ‘em up as for snacks for the pigs!

Pig snacks done!

OK, this is getting serious. Baby’s coming soon and Emmy’s sure of it. (Catahoulas do a great “concerned” look…)

But…Holy smokes, Thanksgiving’s almost here! We’ve got to help our friends at Sheraton Park Farms process pastured-raised turkeys!

Processing turkeys?!?!?!? Cah-mahwn!!! Emmy is very emphatic that something is about to happen!

And Emmy was not wrong. Always trust a Catahoula.

On November 25th our son Elijah Graham Kearns was born.

Look out world is right!

At least one of our two crusty old parrots seemed to like him at their first meeting!

Elijah Graham Kearns - where does a name like that come from?

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That’s all for now - see you next month, folks!

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