Journal, 3.19: In what world does this lifestyle make sense?

And royal ways I've already screwed it up this year.

The weather has been strikingly beautiful these past few days. After the grey haze of winter, with its fits of fog and snow, to see bright beams of sunlight reflecting off the kitchen countertops and copper pots seems otherworldly. For the small-scale homesteader, such as we are, there’s hardly a better time than spring.

This is the time of year when all is possible and we’ve yet to screw up things too badly.

Oh wait. Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.

I spent a solid twenty minutes wrangling a very determined ewe named Fanny yesterday who insisted, quick aggressively, that she’d prefer if I didn’t milk her at all. My milk machine tubes were strewn all about the milking stanchion and I’ll be danged if I didn’t break a fingernail in the struggle. (Still, it’s a small price to pay for a quart of rich, velvety sheep milk so I positively insisted and ultimately prevailed.) To be honest, it made me chuckle. After a decade of battling a dairy cow and the various stages, attitudes, heat cycles, and challenges of such a large animal, a ewe throwing a hissy fit feels a bit like watching a house fly land on your freshly baked muffins. Annoying, but I think we’re going to make it.

Dairy-sheep-hissy-fit aside, it was still a positively glorious afternoon, so I made the short three hundred yard trek inside to refrigerate the milk, past the herb garden (I really must start work on spring cleaning these beds…) and the chicken-house-studio-renovation-project (I really must keep working on that as well…). My eyes were filled, as I glanced around, with “opportunities for advancement and labor” shall I say. There is plenty to keep a homesteader busy in the spring.

But because the weather was so fantastic (and because I was partially blinded by the sun), I felt rather optimistic in spite of the work at hand. This is also in spite of the fact that I’ve been trying to spend at least two hours per day outside, cleaning up pruning and clippings, dead heading perennials, sweeping out beds, laying fresh wood chips on pathways, covering the beds with a fresh layer of compost, weeding, burning, adjusting rock borders, transplanting perennials, and patching irrigation. My back is well aware of how costly it is to keep large-scale flower and vegetable gardens even remotely tidy, and the newly developed pain in my thumb joints is a tell-tale sign of the vast weeding at hand.

In my overly-optimistic, sunny-day glory, I made the three hundred yard trek back up to the greenhouse after milking to check on the trays of seedlings in the greenhouse. I had a glass of wine in hand and was prepared for thirty minutes of greenhouse glory. Though we’re still seven weeks out from our last frost day, and still have plenty of time to plant most all our crops, I started plenty of seeds weeks before was necessary. Partly because I have the space and facility to accommodate large pots and trays as needed and partly because I simply can’t wait to see the growth beginning!

After over a dozen years starting seedlings, I feel more confident now and comfortable in my skin as a gardener. Though I do it differently than others (each of us gardeners, after all, dances to the beat of our own drummer) I am steady and settled in my ways, knowing how to put up healthy flats of this-and-that all spring long.

(Now we’ve come to the place where I got ahead of myself in “not screwing things up too badly”.)