13MAY27

Greetings from Baker Heritage Farms;

This weekend was indicative of being a resilient farmer. Murphy's law was alive and well.

We finally had some good weather and Donald, wanting to take advantage of the nice weather, went down to the production fields Friday evening to start tilling the 1/2 plot for the tomatoes (2C) and the full plot for the peppers (3A). Plot 2C only needed one tilling as it had already been prepped, so Donald started on this plot Friday evening, as he was short of time. While it was a muddy task (this plot was still very wet), things were going well until two rows from the end, when the tiller started acting up. Thinking that it just needed a good cleaning, he decided to pack up and start early Saturday morning.

Saturday morning, after finishing some work in the office, Donald was back down to the production fields intending on starting the initial tilling of plot 3A. He cleaned the entire tiller, only to find out that the problem was not fixed. As he started to take the tiller apart, he noticed that a bolt holding the wheel onto the axle was missing. Off to Ron's Hardware to get another bolt (fortunately they were very helpful and found exactly the right part in a very short amount of time, Donald bought three, just in case). Back to the farm. The wheel was fixed in a short amount of time and tilling was started ... and then it decided to rain. Donald is not too bright at times, and decided he would keep on tilling, thinking the rain would stop. It didn't, so he quit when he could no longer see the tiller (he only got two or three rows tilled). He packed up and came up to the house for lunch. After lunch, he went back down again but did not take everything with him as he did not want to have to worry about more rain. As a result, he ran out of gas and had to come back up to get gas. He did finally get the first tilling done.

On Sunday afternoon, Donald went back down to the production fields (after church and mowing the front yard) and starting cross-tilling plot 3A. Things were going excellent when, about two-thirds of the way through, the recoil rope broke on the tiller. That ended work in the production fields for the weekend.

Donald hopes to get the recoil rope replaced as soon as possible, but with our current schedule, who knows.

In the meantime, our Standn' Plant tool came in (a great tool, we hope, for planting transplants) and we plan to go ahead and plant tomatoes and peppers as soon as possible where possible. Donald will drag what has been tilled and we will go ahead and start planting, either this coming weekend (depending on weather and schedules) or the following weekend.

The turkeys are growing and doing well. The chickens are also growing and doing very well (and got fresh hay Sunday). We have a couple of escape artists. They like to jump up on the gate, and now are jumping into the back yard rather than their pen, so Donald put up a barrier hoping that it will stop them, at least until we can do something more permanent.

This was a quick update as our time seems to be quickly disappearing. One valuable lesson we learned this weekend (we actually learned several) is that we really need to make the farm more efficient, which means having an equipment shed down in the pasture so that we do not have to make so many trips up and down the hill for tools, equipment, etc.

Until next time,

Blessings from Baker Heritage Farms

"The Sky is falling!" - Chicken Little