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The Saucy Farmer

"Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid." ~ John Wayne

Do You Have Any Boxes?

A new year has started and we have been challenged yet again to resolve to change some behavior that we have not been able to change in the past forty something years or start a new regimen that will undoubtedly improve us as human beings in one way or another. Yes, it’s time for new years resolutions. We are not sure of the origins of the tradition, but we do know that in the world of pro sports or business or even rock paper scissors if the win/loss ratio was equivalent to the quantity of new years resolutions that actually were kept the world would be a quiet lonely place.

Ed often says that if you are dissatisfied because your expectations have not been met it is easiest just to lower your standards. He wanted to declare a new years resolution to not get leprosy or fall out of a stunt airplane while doing tricks. Both good positive ideas but not totally in keeping with the intent of the whole resolution plot. So after much consternation and deep thought, (as deep as it gets when you are surrounded by farm animals all day) we have decided that the idea of having a single resolution for a year is an underachievers dream and that we should all continue to pursue bettering ourselves perpetually. If we go after constant improvement there is no telling where we will end up. But, if we only improve one time a year, and beat the current odds of successful new years resolution, at best we will only change forty or so things about ourselves and Gayle can list that many improvements that Ed needs with half her brain tied behind her back.

We have finally come to some resolution regarding housing and the destiny of our farm friends. We have rented the home near Lake Davidson. It is much closer to Kaitlin and Nate’s place AND civilization. Our (Ed’s) desire to become a farm mogul is also still alive due to some high level eleventh hour negotiations. Our current neighbors, Brad and Mia have agreed to co-op with us and use their land and our labor to continue with the chickens and produce. We will move the “barn”(semi trailer), the chicken coop and the tractor and equipment to the other side of the fence. We must have really looked pitiful because they agreed readily to the proposal. It may have been Ed’s crying but we can’t be sure.

As far as future plans we will be living in the town of Davidson. Davidson is a college town that is kind of a cross between ivy-league and super yuppie. There is still quite a bit of open land but the cost per acre makes it more suitable to development than farming. It is approximately thirty minutes from Davidson to downtown Charlotte and Lake Norman with all of its lake front properties borders the western edge of the town. Davidson is also home to one of the areas best run and best attended farmers markets. Every Saturday year round the market is open and supports local produce sales and farmers. Ed can hear the cash register already. Cha-Ching.

As far as the inmates at Crooked Gate Natural Farm and Detention Facility are concerned everyone is doing well. We would probably be shunned by the locals if they knew how spoiled our animals are. The goats are getting to be teenagers and beg to be taken back to the pasture every time someone walks out the back door. Goat food from a bag is not near as much fun as standing up on your hind legs and pulling the leaves off the lower branches of the trees. The big chickens are laying four fabulous eggs a day. John Adams waits for Ed to come home and runs full speed through the yard in anticipation of a handful of corn. He has been doing very well as the leader of his harem and lets the girls know when they are out of line. He has come to terms with Gayle regarding hanging around on the deck, with only an occasional climb to the railing to crow as loud as he can. (It’s a chicken thing).

The baby chickens are nine weeks old and have been getting time out of their cell in the exercise yard. When they move over to the new place they will be in a new chicken coop with all of the amenities. While they haven’t seen the big chickens place yet we are sure that, being in the cluckers and layers union local 123, they will demand equal pay for equal work. We are considering having an attorney on retainer if the farm continues to grow to handle negotiations. Ultimately if we encounter too much resistance from the work force we will move them from egg processing into the broiling and roasting facility and replace them with cheap labor from Central America.

Last week Ed took Gayle shopping at Concord Mills Mall to distract her from all of the stress and anxiety associated with being homeless. She was so tense that she decided to get a chair massage from the oriental woman in the center of the mall. She beat Gayle like she was trying to tenderize a piece of meat in a twenty minute episode that constitutes assualt in every state but Alabama. All in all, after a week that included running out of propane and having no heat in the house for two days, the water heater failing and needing to be replaced, the Sheriff coming to the door to foreclose on our landlord and repacking a lot of things that haven’t even had time to breathe since they were unpacked, we are happy and thankful that God cares for people like us even if we aren’t so good at taking care of ourselves and each other.

On The Road Again

Our sincerest apologies for all of you blognuts that have missed our tales of farm adventures for the last couple of weeks. We have been occupied with pursuing financing of the farm property, but regretfully have been refused repeatedly. Apparently these two people named Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac work for all of the local banks and for some reason do not like us. Every time we have tried to talk to them we are referred to our congressman and he doesn’t seem to have a clue. Go figure.

Due to frequent and drastic changes in the federal regulations for lending many qualified people with good credit have been penalized for decisions made by self-serving politicians over the past years. So unfortunately unless we have a long lost uncle that keels over and leaves us a stack of folding money we are going to have to relocate. We also had the idea of soliciting everyone we know for the loose change from the ashtray in their car, but if you’ve ever had to count and roll that much change you know we wouldn’t finish by our February first deadline. We may start tearing the walls out of the house tomorrow to see if any money is hidden there. We’ll be sure to let you know.

We did get to have a nice Christmas dinner with Kaitlin and Nate and actually had snow (for you purists). Ed has decided that he still is disgusted by snow and the necessity to shovel it and drive in it and is considering moving even further south, like Cuba. They never have snow there and the cigars are fabulous. He also thinks our government is resembling the government in Cuba more and more every day so it shouldn’t be a big adjustment. As is typical for the holidays we all have overeaten and gained some weight. It has been interesting to watch the drivers here in the snow. They have no salt and only four plows so when it does accumulate all the road crews can do is make the roads more slippery by compacting the ice. The obvious solution is to drive faster as if that will heat up your tires or maybe get you home before it really gets bad. Let’s just say that the local emergency response personnel have been active lately.

The goats and chickens have not been informed of their pending relocation. The goats are up for adoption and we are arranging fingerprinting and background checks for prospective parents. Two families have already been eliminated because they could not pass their psychological exams.

 The chickens will probably fulfill the remainder of their contract in triple-A league over at farmer Arts place. They will soon be nine weeks old. They may get called up to major league egg laying sometime in April or May.

We are not sure where we will be housed next but have been looking diligently. Gayle has found a beautiful one-year-old home on Lake Norman that has a lot more room and all of the desirable upgrades any good suburban princess could possibly desire. The downside is that it has an (.189) acre lot. For those of you keeping score, nine one-thousandths of an acre is 392 square feet. That’s four garden rows fifty feet long or room for about twenty chickens to free range. We just have to get our lawyers to challenge the Home Owners Association rules prohibiting “livestock”.

We really do appreciate all of your interest in our wayward lives. Please pray for us as we deal with legal issues related to the real estate situation and as we go through the stress of moving one more time.

Finally, a clucking victory!!!

It has finally happened. We have successfully harvested our first two eggs. Eggs are one of those things that we always took for granted when we walked into the grocery store and bought them by the dozen. As a kid I never even considered the time and effort that goes into the production of those favorite projectiles of hoodlums everywhere. As of this morning if our chickens stopped laying, those two eggs would have a production cost somewhere near four hundred dollars each. But, being the perpetual optimists that we are, those eggs represent the first of many treats that we will harvest from our foray into the wild world of agricultural speculation.

After a brief version of the happy dance and some high fives because we knew that we had proven mans superiority over chickens, we realized that eggs are fleeting and we needed to do something with them besides having them bronzed, so Chris decided it was time to make a pie. A pumpkin pie to be more specific. We eagerly set about the task of preparing fresh pumpkin filling from Kaitlin's remaining fall decorations and included our two eggs. This won't take long, did it! A short time later and some fresh homemade whipped cream and this beauty was all ours.

While the big chickens have been doing chicken things and have now started to earn their keep, the babies are just eating and running and more eating. They are five weeks old and still have no idea that some of them are destined for a very short vacation in the G.E. tanning bed along with a side of green beans. At twelve weeks we will choose ten good looking showgirls that we think will produce eggs like Chinese women produce knock-off Kate Spade purses and the rest become naked penguin look-alikes in the freezer in the shed. The truth is that neither Ed nor Chris is looking forward to "Chicken Day", but it's part of the job.

Super Chicken continues to hold his own as a standout in the baby chicken crowd. We are seeing more and more "rooster" type behavior every day, although it is still a little to early to tell by looking if he's a he or she's a she. Regardless of this ones gender, it is definitely smarter and more aggressive than its counterparts. Yes, Chris and I have had the discussion that it looks an awful lot like a hawk. Boy, wouldn't that be funny.

You can see how much our friend has grown and how silly the Buff Orpingtons can be.

We are continuing research and planning for our spring planting. This week we cleaned and dried the pumpkin seeds out of all of the pumpkins Kaitlin and Gayle were using for decorations. Gayle will probably not notice that her pumpkins are gone, but if she does Nate will not be here to defend himself. Our rule is be here or be blamed. It happens. We harvested 2584 seeds. That is enough to plant about two and a half acres. Some quick math will tell us that if we plant 2584 plants and each plant yields two good sized pumpkins then we will only have to sell them for $193.50 each to gross one million dollars. That won't all be profit though because we will need to purchase a vehicle that can haul thirty six thousand pounds of pumpkins because they all need to be sold the week before Halloween. Figuring that the average wholesale price of a pumpkin is somewhere around two dollars each, we should probably be satisfied with recovering the cost of the gasoline for the tractor. All of the seeds are stored in the window envelopes Gayle saves that come with all those pesky bills Ed likes to ignore. If you look closely you can see that six of the seven envelopes are from the same company. They must really be upset. We use the mail to start the bonfire and recycle the envelopes. Maybe we will win an award from Al Gore for being so green. Apparently anyone can get a Nobel Prize these days.

We have also been looking into raising cows for beef. There are quite a few dairy and beef farms in our area. Wikipedia said that the highest priced beef is called Kobe beef from Japan. While we have never been to Japan we have purchased goods from Wal-mart. We are thinking about hiring some experienced Japanese fellows to assist us in our Kobe beef production. Check out this link to learn all about Kobe Beef.

We had a great meal Saturday with Kaitlin and Nate. Fresh free range grain fed beef hamburgers from farmer Art and fresh homemade coleslaw using one of Chris's heads of cabbage. I think we all could get used to this.

Holidays and Birthdays

As usual at Crooked Gate Farm the entertainment is often disguised as farm animals doing their thing as God intended. We are sure that our ancestors that relied on their farms as the sole method of providing sustenance for the entire family found little if any humor in animal antics, but we sure are amused regularly by the group dynamics and species specific idiosyncrasies.

The week started somewhat anxiously when John Adams took exception to Chris attempting to be nice and give him some attention, resulting in a beak shaped laceration on Chris's hand. Obviously rooster number one has no idea that Chris is well versed in the martial arts and his hands could be registered as lethal weapons. Chris, as usual, was gracious and decided that he was not in the mood for chicken stew that night so Mr. Adams continues on, believing that he is Lord of the Manor and we are here to serve him.

On the other hand he has figured out that Ed is always so pre-occupied and busy with farm tasks that if you bother him he will throw some corn your way to get you to leave him alone. Now every time Ed walks past the big chickens they follow him until he provides the treats.

The little chickens (twenty-three of them) are now four weeks old and have grown from cotton balls to pigeon size and have all of their feathers. The original brooder box could no longer house them so alternative accommodations have been constructed. The crew has moved from eight square feet into twenty-four square feet. We are still keeping them separated from the large chickens until all of their chicken training is complete. The chicken races are still very entertaining and Super Chicken is always the favorite to come away with the prize (crickets or worms).

On December sixth Woody and Charlotte celebrated their second birthday by taking a trip to Mayberry. Yes, I said Mayberry with Sheriff Andy, Opie, Barney and the whole crew. Mayberry is actually modeled after the town that Andy Griffith grew up in about an hour north of us called Mount Airy. If you stand in downtown Mount Airy you can see Pilot Mountain (Mount Pilot in the show) in the background. When we arrived in Mayberry the locals were just getting ready to kick off the annual Christmas parade (people down here still call it Christmas, not “The Holidays” or some other white washed, P.C., tree hugging, lefty, why can’t we all just get along term) right down main street past the diner and Floyd’s Barber Shop. We managed to drive down Main Street just before the parade and see some of the beautiful homes and landmarks while thousands of onlookers wondered who we were and why we were in the front of the parade. Gayle was just a touch uncomfortable being stared at but Ed was very excited to see Otis, the town drunk complete with his brown jug of hooch. We managed to escape before the Mount Airy High School marching band caught up with us and headed for home, stopping at our new Sunday afternoon hot spot, the feed store.

Chris spent Monday at farmer Art’s place helping him clean up for the winter. We are grateful that Art is recovering from his mule incident, although slowly. The task of the day was cleaning out the pigpen after three weeks. Chris said that after you get used to the smell it’s still no fun. Again the whole family benefits from Chris’s labor as Art sent him home with some top quality grain fed beef and pork. Art also mentioned that he would be interested in sharing some space in his roadside stand next season, which may be a great way to begin to market the sixty thousand pounds of tomatoes that you can harvest on one good acre. We’re going to need a bigger truck!

Thanksgivin' Ya'll

Its definitely fall and most of the leaves are down now, which creates a few long days of work. The plan was to collect the leaves with the leaf vacuum and compost them for use in the garden to amend the soil, but it looks like we may end up with more leaves than soil. We have somewhere around two hundred and fifty trees on the property. Multiply that by ten million leaves per tree and there are enough zeros to make the leaf blower commit suicide. We know that the leaves have been here before but have no idea what the previous owners did with all of them. We searched the Internet for oak leaf recipes and found nothing even remotely appetizing, so they probably did not eat them. Even the chickens push the leaves aside to look underneath for food. We are diligently working on a plan to market them in some way and use the profits to subsidize our auction disorder.

Thanksgiving the neighbor turkey must have consulted with the Obama campaign folks and pulled an upset victory late in the week. Either that or he was purposely misnamed and we feel misled because we saw him early Friday morning strutting around the barnyard along with Christmas (the other turkey) Blue the peacock, the potbelly pig and chickens and cows. We don’t want to think that Brad and Mia were purposely deceptive so lets consider the possible reasons for the turkeys continued existence. Perhaps the neighbors have suddenly turned from carnivorous liver mush consumers into left wing ultra liberal tree hugging vegans and are plotting the demise of the entire pork, beef and chicken industries as we know them. Or maybe the turkey has learned the art of hypnosis and convinced everyone next door that he is actually a long lost relative and that he will be living with them for a period of time until he recovers from the current financial crisis. Could it be shape-shifting aliens in farm country? We may never know the truth but we will go with the story that Mia and Brad are really running a retirement home for farm animals and they will all live long happy lives.

Kaitlin and Nate and Chris visited the Great White North for the holiday weekend and saw family and old friends. They all reported having an enjoyable but hectic time and were relieved to make the trek home to their own homes and beds. Chris as usual had quite a few misadventures during the trip, mostly involving his refusal to use the GPS for navigational assistance, but after many miles he still managed to find his way back home again. On Saturday when they all left for home there was some snow on the ground in Cleveland while it was sixty-two degrees on the farm.



Christopher had the opportunity to share Thanksgiving dinner with his Aunt Jenny and family at the Keener farm in Wakeman, Ohio. He swapped farm tales and received farm animal rearing advice. Chris decided that he likes the Keeners goats Franklin and Claire better than ours because they are friendlier and will walk in the woods without a leash and behave. I think the truth is that he sees a lot of himself in our goat Laverne. They are both very idealistic and opinionated and choose to approach life in their own way. Neither of them is influenced by peer pressure at all when making decisions and consequences are just minor inconveniences that are the price you pay for proving a point.

While we missed our visit with the Schoenherr family due to their trading a virus back and forth for the last few weeks we did have Dan Kelley come and visit. Now that motorcycle-racing season is over Dan found time to get away from home and see how the farm half lives. While Dan seemed to enjoy the warmer weather I think he could do without roosters crowing in the morning and the special aroma that twenty-five three-week-old chickens seem to produce. While the chickens don't seem to mind the smell it is definitely not something you would want sprayed on you by an over zealous salesperson while trying to navigate the perfume counters at Macys in the mall. Dan is very good at observing the activity from a distance with a coffee cup in one hand. We did get to use up some of those pesky old bullets that have been lying around Dan’s house out on the rifle range (also doubles as the deck). Apparently the gun law enforcement in Rowan County, North Carolina is not as stringent as Avon Lake, Ohio. Gee, who would have known? And of course in Dan’s honor we had a two Nate fire in celebration.

All in all we had a quiet and relaxing Thanksgiving that reminded us once again of the magnitude of the blessings that God has granted us.

The leaves are mostly off of the trees here, with the exception of the pin oaks that will wait to lose the last of their leaves until the leaf blower is retired for the season, and the mood is becoming a little somber. The animals obviously have been meeting in the barn to discuss the dreaded upcoming event, Thanksgiving. At first we would have never guessed that the farm crew was intuitive enough to understand the issues involved with the holiday season, but now we are sure that they do. The neighbor's turkeys, oddly named Thanksgiving and Christmas, are campaigning for new holiday traditions and have chosen to break away from the livestock union and go it alone in their quest.

John Adams and the girls on the other hand are sure that their responsibilities here on the farm are less ominous and have opted to challenge the no animals in the hot tub rule. They have made themselves quite at home as "free rangers" and Gayle has been frustrated attempting to convince them not to hang out on the deck. They have been granted some latitude so far though, due to the fact that we are still negotiating an appropriate egg-laying contract. We have yet to see any egg production from the girls, but we are sure we will come to terms well before spring training.

The goat girls are doing well and have taken to playing a game called shadow. If you walk by the goat pen they follow you like a shadow in an attempt to endear themselves and convince you to let them out for a romp. They are very talkative and have something to add to any topic of conversation. They are still being temporarily housed in a plywood shelter with a hurricane roof (blue tarp). The big project lately has been to repair the electric fence that surrounds the pasture and woods so that the goats can have free run and do some lawn maintenance in the south forty. Fence maintenance is a repetitive and ongoing task for the farmer. Farmer Art says that all he does is grow grass and repair fence. The up side is that every time Ed accidentally grabs the electric fence it recharges his pacemaker battery.

The cats are also doing well and actually are enjoying watching the Thanksgiving politics on the farm unfold. The girls long ago realized that the type of people that are in the market for cat by the pound live far from here and even then the market for lumpy old outdoor cat is almost non-existent. They have a better chance of going down in a plane crash, so they are very comfortable sitting and watching all of the work and politics happen.

We have been working on the "official" end of farming as well and are now registered as "Crooked Gate Natural Farms" with the State of North Carolina, County of Rowan Register of Deeds. No, we did not have to go to Mount Pilot or Pixley to do this, but we did have to go to Salisbury, the county seat of Rowan County, and pay our fourteen dollars for the privilege of being tracked and taxed by Uncle Obama. We spent the better part of the last eight weeks mulling over names for the place, but settled on Crooked Gate after working on the fence. If you have ever hung a farm gate on a post in the middle of a field you know how hard it is to keep them straight and how fast they settle as soon as you walk away. With a name like Crooked Gate Farm we can say that all of the leaning gates are part of our marketing plan to avoid the scrutiny of the engineer types that notice that kind of thing.

We are looking forward to the Schoenherrs visiting from Ohio for Thanksgiving dinner and a weekend of farm frivolity and caloric overload. If nothing else we will all be a bit warmer and sunnier here in the South Ya'll.