“Oh, you don’t need to worry about that.”
Our utility, earth-moving, and tree-falling contractor gave us an earnest, sage look, nodding his head in tune with the ancient rhythms of life on our little island in the middle of the Salish Sea, and swore it never gets so cold here that pipes freeze. While helping build our house, Bubba did a super job on selective-harvest timber falling and zipped our water line, electric line, and cutoff drains into the ground like he was just darning socks. So he must have been right about the climate, right?
Yeah, right.
Two years later, the mercury plunged below 10 degrees F in late December, following a 17-inch snowfall. “Hardly ever snows much here,” locals say. This isn’t our first rodeo, so we set drips running in the house and the barn, but even so, a plastic faucet in the tack room froze and broke. We had to shut off the water line to the barn.
Took eight months for our plumber to come fix it. We filled the horse troughs with hand-carried buckets. Every day.
Ain’t much an ol' country boy like me can’t hack It’s early to rise, early in the sack Thank God I’m a country boy.I’m a city boy born and raised, but all my life I have wanted to spend my days under these exact circumstances. I wouldn’t trade our life for any other, but moving to a 27-acre farm does bring learnings. Be careful what you wish for.
Domestic Animals Have Only 1 Hobby: Escape
Mind you, confinement on a farm is not like on Central Park West. Our equines, a Polish Warmblood gelding (“Mr Big”) and a Shetland pony (“Cocoa-Nut,” emphasis on “nut”), have their own four-acre green-grass pasture.
Our Weimaraner, Blue, who can leap tall buildings in a single bound and outrace a Lamborghini, has his own personal swimming pond. But he still likes to sneak uphill through the woods to see if his girlfriend Leia is outside. We installed an in-ground electric fence, but Blue runs faster than the fence-buzz signal. So the phone rings (when it’s working).
How can 2 Horses Manufacture so Much Fertilizer?
Our manure pile has twice reached five cubic yards. That’s a lot. Want some? World’s best fertilizer, totally organic, hyperlocal, pH balanced, high nitrogen, lots of potassium, magnesium, and other vital trace minerals. Bring your truck over and load ‘er high and tight.One of our equines is, well, major league—17 hands, 1,400 pounds. Luckily, Cereus (his real name) is an excellent gentleman and even lets Cocoa nip him without hauling off and blasting the little guy into the next island. They both process meadow grass at world-class through-put rates.
The Point of Life Is Mowing
Fourteen acres of grass, which grows an inch a day in April and May ... you do the math.What’s in Your Pocket?
It better be dog and horse biscuits or else. Cocoa might eat your jeans if he’s in a peckish mood.Multiply Everything by 2
Everything. How long to build the barn? Twice what they say. How much? Twice.How many saddles? Two. Halters and horses? Two (so far). Dogs? Dos. Mowers? Yep, two.
Two hand pliers, two channel-lock pliers, two axes, two chainsaws, two vehicles (plus a Gator), two outbuildings, two hay meadows, two tool kits, two shovels, two pruners, two ladders, and so on. Two pockets, two biscuits in each.
Two freezers, one mostly meat.
Leave the Fast and Furious to Hollywood
You can’t sharpen a saw chain in a hurry. Super wet-vacs don’t work in horse stalls. Five years before your Gravenstein has a big crop. High-speed morning mowing just clogs the blade chamber. The dew will dry in due time.School’s Out for the Summer
Nothing you learned in 18 years of education will do you any good. Did they teach you how to use channel locks in each hand while holding an old hose in your teeth? Nope. How to buck 150 bales of hay 10 feet high in the barn? Uh-uh. Hook up a trickle charger to a mower battery rusted in place? Quadratic equations don’t help.Some of these items used to be covered in a class called “shop,” but no one offers that any more. Not DEI-compliant.
Tools Lost and Counting
Tools disappear. They just do. No telling where they go. Did a worker inadvertently take one? Did the mower-blade metal file hide in a hay bale? Did the four-foot crowbar you only use 10 times a year decide it wants a more active life in a different part of the island?Thing is, you won’t find out until you need it. You look in the garage, the mud room, the barn, the back of the Gator, the garden shed ... Nada.
Food Delivery Not Guaranteed
This phrase describes what happens when your spouse brings you a bag of tortilla chips from the kitchen. The service is not always available.You Will Run Out of Gas
But not by the garage, where the gas cans are. It'll be at the farthest corner of your property.Treasure the Love of Every Being on the Farm
I mean it. You may find that 42 heirloom fruit trees—apples, pears, cherries, plums, figs, quinces—have come to live in your orchard. Rabbits don’t eat your garden because your foxes eat the rabbits. Ten kinds of fresh berries from May to October; three hundred ears of corn and 20 pounds of dry beans each summer. Store-bought food tastes like nose tissue.
Since you left the television back in the big city, the songbird symphony outside your window is what you get for morning news. Need something to watch? The farm has its own programming. Each spring, a pair of red foxes raise a litter of kits by the lower corner of the horse paddock, and you can watch them all roll and tumble in the grazed grass flats. Blue and his new little brother Simon watch for hours, mesmerized.
Now you live inside the loop of life, and even with all the quirks and hiccups, your blood pressure will drop and your serenity will grow. This is exactly how I wanted to live ever since the 8-year-old boy who used to be me first nurtured a maple seedling in a small garden in our Squirrel Hill home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
There is nothing like a fresh-made marionberry pie in July or fresh-drawn apple cider in October. Nothing like tall lilies in the morning light at 6. Nothing at all like the honeyed scent of new-mown hay and the clean, clear topaz air that swallows the smoke, ash, and bullets of distant human events.
As John Martin Sommers put it, “Live a good life and play my fiddle with pride, and thank God you’re a country boy.”
