A SPECIAL THANKS.

It's dark and it's raining. Not hard, just obnoxiously––the kind of rain that seeks, that comes up from underneath, drifts sideways and finds your dry spots no matter how well covered they are. And for a bonus, the rain has made the ground around the house slick and muddy and ideal for handling turkeys.The turkeys are roosted by this point, so its easy enough to sneak up on them in the dark to load them into the truck. They kick and flail when we catch them, throwing mud and wetness about wildly, but everyone makes it in unharmed. Not thrilled, but unharmed.It feels good to have them loaded, and sad. And the next day it feels good to hand them one by one to the processor, and sad. It feels good and sad to raise an animal strictly to kill it, then good and sad to eat it. But that's what farming is and we are always thankful when we can feel both good and sad about an animal we eat. Because it's a lot of hard work, from start to muddy finish, but it's nothing in comparison to what they do for us.As difficult as they were this year, we are thankful for how much the turkeys challenged us, how much more they taught us about farming. Hannah and I are thankful these birds will be a part of so many good dinners, and appreciated by so many wonderful people. Thankful for our own bird, in the oven as I write this. Then when dinner is over, and leftovers exhausted, we will be thankful for how much richer the turkeys made our farm, and the strength and energy they give us to continue working on making it, our community and world a healthier place. Our thankfulness will not just be spoken at dinner then, but demonstrated in our actions throughout our lives. So thank you, Turkeys, we will do our best to never stop giving you thanks.- Jesse.

THIS & THAT.

Some random photos from the past week.Setting up for some trick-or-treaters....even in Bugtussle!Arrowhead hunting with Ira. Sweet potatoes.....all day, every day.This one got ENORMOUS while we were gone! A blurry shot as we chased the escaped turkeys through the yard. This is basically what our life looks like these days. 

FARM ON, YOUNG FARMERS.

When I came in from seeding carrots Hannah was sitting in her chair calculating our income. "Do you want to know how much we've made this year," she asks, grinning.Using my shirt to wipe the sweat from my face I say, "Oh God, not really.""$13,000."Truth be told, that's more than I expected her to say. I expected her to say $10,000, or less. Zero wouldn't have surprised me. Still, $13,000 is a pretty sad number to be relieved by, as it represents the combined income for two full-time workers nine months into the year. I did some quick math and figured that if everything goes more or less perfectly, we will earn around $16,000 in 2014, total.But we lost $4,500 worth of turkeys. We had a bad mushroom year. Our main season tomatoes crapped out on us early, and we didn't start late tomatoes. I admittedly made a few costly gardening mistakes. The market we attend in Nashville failed spectacularly this year. And of course, the drought wasn't particularly merciful. However, if we had earned everything we should have earned this year, or even most of it, it wouldn't have been so bad. Really, the year would have been good. And all signs point to next year being better, so we try to take comfort in that. You live and learn and move on.Despite our struggles, though, we're still pretty happy farmers. In fact I've never, poor or not, been more proud of, or satisfied by, what I do. I love this job and wouldn't do anything else. And it's only our third year living (almost) solely off a farming income, so we're still learning how to make it work for us. But we know what we're capable of now on what kind of scale we'd like to grow. Looking towards next year, I can say with confidence we'll be alright no matter what the season holds. If we survived this year, still happy, with not a lot of money but a winter's supply of storage crops in the cellar, I'd say we can survive just about any year. Especially since no year going forward will depend on the survival of turkeys. Ever again.- Jesse.

A THURSDAY IN THE LIFE.

 In continuation of our "Day in the Life" series, I give you Thursday, July 10.5 - 5:30 a.m.Morning chores. Feed the turkeys, the nineteen we have left that is, and walk through the garden. This is when I discover that the rabbits have eaten all but a few of the beans I was naively believing they were somehow not going to eat––you know, since it's summer and there's nothing but other things to consume. Needless to say, I curse a little. I have some holes in the fence to be fixed, but until then I plan to set a live trap and to give the rabbit a stern talking to when I catch it.5:30 - 7 a.m.Breakfast (rice with tomatoes and red lentil curry) and writing.7 - 7:45 a.m.I spend this time in our garden fixing tomato trellises and setting the live trap for the bunny. If I call it a bunny and not a rabbit, I have an easier time keeping my cool about the situation.7:45 - 8:45I call the Smiths who say they'll be ready in about an hour or so to harvest onions, so I take the opportunity to go get our truck from the mechanic. It runs like a dream––a dream with 200,000 miles on it.8:45 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.Get everything prepared in the greenhouse to hold and cure the onions. The Smiths join us and we harvest thousands of bulbs, place each in the greenhouse to cure, and cover the them to protect from the sun. We'd spent the day before at Salamander Springs Farm in Berea so we all had plenty to talk about and the conversation made the sweat-drenched job go fast, as conversation is wont to do.1:30 - 3:15Lunch (chicken livers with rice, corn and onions), and nap time. Listening to NPR I learn Garth Brooks is releasing a double album of new music and find myself embarrassingly excited about this.3:15-3:45 p.m.I always wake up to a fresh dose of clarity after naps. And that's when I remember I was going to do a "day in the life" today, and start to write down everything we did, and remember everything we'd done. Thus, all of the above activities, though true, have been assigned mildly arbitrary times. Do you feel duped? I would feel duped.3:45 p.m - 4:30 p.m.Spend about an hour mulching. We always mulch a lot but, but perhaps inspired by the farm we saw the day before where there is no bare soil anywhere, I rather enjoy it this time. Also discover we lost another turkey. From fifty-three, now down to eighteen. Sigh.4:30 - 7 p.m.Hannah and I join Cher in the garden to transplant or seed all of our winter squash and pumpkins––all 1400 row feet or so of it. Considering we'd been putting it off for a month, it feels good to get it done.7 - 7:40 p.m.Move the goats. They're looking good. I can finally leave them alone and they seem to keep eating. This keeps them fat and happy. And it keeps me sane. Symbiosis in action.7:40 - 10 p.m.Dinner and a movie. After returning "Happy People," we received "Micmacs," the latest from Jean Pierre Jeunet, director of "Amelie". What a great movie. I had some most excellent dreams after watching it––I even purchased a copy of Garth Brook's new record for Hannah in one of them. She was psyched... in the dream. In reality she told me we were not going to buy it because, well, we have several million other things we need a little more. And I suppose she has a good point, as women with babies in their bellies tend to have in these situations.10 p.m.Bed.- Jesse.