Vaughnshire Farm

I don’t know about all boys, but our boys are attracted to mud like bees to honey…. or flies to fly tape… or chickens to clean porches…

Our very large mud puddle ( soon to be my beautiful garden pond one year)  is a favorite stomping ground for two highly energetic boys.  Here I find them yelling at one another, “Clean as a baby!” and then whack…a hand full of mud is hurled through the air…then a chorus of laughter…and the game repeats itself for an hour.  Who needs outside toys with a mud puddle like this! 

…for a young entrepreneur

It is a blessed sight to see a young man be about the business of men instead of being idle.  The problem with having boys pursuing the work of starting up businesses is that it ultimately affects me in ways that my flesh would rather not be affected by. 

This morning, I attempted to finish up my growing pile of laundry all the while working around a big box of chirping birds at my feet.  That’s the box of 104 new baby chicks that arrived early this morning!  That’s 104 more birds to add to the other menagerie of birds wandering around in the yard.  That’s a 104 more birds that weren’t my idea!

The boys had been in and out of the house finishing up the last minute details on the chicken brooder before the noisy birds could be taken out to the barn.  Inconvenience yes…but more than that is the picture I see out the back door…that of the ever increasing myriad of animals roaming the back yard, the bright orange construction fence they put up around one of the chicken pens, the pile of wood they insist is important building material, their Thanksgiving turkeys that shower poop all over the girl’s playhouse on a daily basis and … well, must I go on?  I go back into the house and shut the door and pretend I just came in from a stroll in my beautiful southern garden.  I am a very exact, like-every-book-strait-and-my-cans-in-the-pantry-alphabetized type of obsessive person.  I can’t figure out why God gave me that type of personality and then decided to bless me with 5 boys!  He knew I needed to grow up, learn the meaning of patience and self-sacrifice and have layers of selfishness knocked off; so He blessed me with children!

The point is that having boys pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors and learning how to be about the business of men is messy!  I have to reevaluate my expectations of a perfectly manicured lawn (HA!) and a reasonable amount of laundry and come to grips with the fact that these things just aren’t to be at this season in my life.  After all, things are messy in a construction zone.  It isn’t until after considerable time, effort, dust and hard work refining, building and creating that the construction zone, one day, turns into a beautiful work of art. 

We grow lots of rocks and weeds in our humble garden, but we are also enjoying some real food grown by the efforts of our children.  It is a challenge in self-restraint to ban myself from stepping foot into the garden this season–I am good so far.  The children have been working the garden this year and look what they brought in to me this week!

By the looks of things, you would not imagine such fruit could come out of such a patch of weeds, however, I am learning that some things, like a weed free garden, just don’t matter.  What matters is giving the children the opportunity to work on a project, like growing food for the family, by allowing them to experiment, learn, experience failure, labor and enjoy success. 

Earlier this week the 5 year old brought me two NOT READY TO BE PICKED zucchini and said, “MOM, are these ready to be picked yet?”  I told him, actually, no..they aren’t ready yet…but thank you…and don’t pick any more vegetables unless a bigger person tells you to. 

If you could have know how farm illiterate/challenged we were just a few years ago, you might appreciate some of the farm stories all the more.  I remember driving by a neighbor’s farm not long after we had moved from out of the city and looking at all their “goats” in the field.  We had been looking for some goats to clear some brush and they seemed to have an abundance of them.  Maybe they would sell us a couple of them?  So we pulled over and asked the elderly gentleman about his “goats”. 

He starred at us a while, looked back over at his “herd” and looked back at us and said, “Well, Dem ain’t goats, Dem are sheep!” 

Minor mistake.

Back then, telling sheep and goats apart proved to be a challenge for us.   Did you know there was such a thing as hair sheep–they don’t look like the typical woolly sheep.  

My, how far we have come! 

A couple of weeks ago, our 5 year old comes running in the house after being outside for a while working with the big guys.  He mainly observes and hangs around the boys when they are working.  He still gets distracted with honeysuckle, ant piles and lizards. 

So I asked him what he was up to and he says, “Well, I was just watching daddy and the boys cut up one of the rams and put cheerios on the other ram.” 

Hmmm….I had no idea what he was talking about. 

After some more inquiry and vague 5 year old answers, I found out that daddy and the boys were castrating the baby rams…and he had been watching them.  They decided to do the old fashion cut on one of them, like last year’s pig and use the handy dandy elastrator banding tool (using cheerio looking rubber bands) on the other one. 

You know…just a regular day in the life of a farm boy. 

A very excited 7 year old boy came flying in the house announcing that one of his “Super Buff” chickens finally laid an egg! These 2 “chicks” are important to him because they are the ones he nursed back to health 5 months ago. 

Unfortunately, we didn’t get any pictures of the actual disbudding process.  With milking our goats and small children handling the goats, we prefer having them (the goats) with out horns, so we decided to have our friend come over and show us how to disbud our week old baby Alpine goat.  It included putting the baby into a little box with only her head sticking out and heating up something like an iron rod so that the horn buds could be burned off.  She ended up looking quite strange for a while…

I took my first sip of our goat’s milk not too long ago— very cautiously.  We have heard bad stories about how horrible goat’s milk is…it’s goaty, tastes gamey, you won’t like it…

However, I was pleasantly surprised that the goat’s milk we have been getting was far from the stories we have been told!  Maybe the taste of milk differs drastically between breeds or maybe all the bad goat milk comes from animals that eat all the brush and wild onions?  All I know is our goat milk is absolutely delicious and we are enjoying having an additional supply of milk.  At a later date, I would love to draw up a comparison between milking goats and milking a cow.  There are many things we have learned about milking cows and goats.  Many differences, but both provide great raw milk for the family. 

We enjoyed a meal last week with fresh broccoli and cauliflower from the garden along with some of our farm raised pork.  Not any great quantities of broccoli or cauliflower yet…but a simple start.

We have been busily working around here on the farm trying to plant our garden.  With me being 9 months pregnant, I am not gardening….I am trying my hand at managing.  It has given us a wonderful opportunity to delegate tasks to the children and stretch them beyond what they were doing last year.  And for me?  It has been good practice for me to let things go and not micro manage every little detail to my liking. 

My country gentlemen prepared and planted a garden spot for the heirloom variety of corn called Country Gentleman.  A while back they all planted potatoes, onions, cauliflower and broccoli that are thriving and growing beautifully.  This week they worked on planting warmer vegetables like green beans, okra, cucumbers, squash etc. 

Considering the season of life we are in currently, I am pleased with our progress, but I can’t help but be awed by the amazing gardens of history.  Gardening has lost much flair and importance to modern man.  Not too many years ago, gardening was an essential part of life.  Even those who lived in “neighborhood” type areas had garden plants or fruit trees planted in their back yard.  Historically, famous families such as George Washington,  John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, James Madison had extensive gardens on their land.  In the past, the White House was home to incredible gardens.  As President, Andrew Jackson built an orangery to accommodate indoor, year-round gardening.  That has since been demolished.

I love to visit gardens at The Hermitage and The Carnton Plantation.  Of course they have full time gardeners working in them, but they are beautiful and inspiring to say the least. 

Our garden here is absolutely nothing even comparable and may indeed turn into a jungle, but this year and this season in our life, a jungle that produces food, amidst the crooked rows and weeds, would at least be something. 

Maybe I should start a gardening apprenticeship here?