Spinach, beets and dog escapes

We've finally got some dirt under our nails.

Laurie gave us a late start at 10am today (rare, she says) so we started off the day right with some unbelievably good farm-fresh eggs from her chickens. The yokes were a dark vibrant orange and sooo amazingly good. Big perk.

We had another order to fill today - 7lbs of spinach, leaf lettuce and arugula. I knocked out the lettuce pretty quickly and headed over to help Dave pick spinach. Lemme tell you, picking spinach is not for the faint of the heart. You have to pick it leaf by leaf, finding a good big leaf, cutting it at the stem and tossing it in the bushel. It takes FOREVER. And it can be demoralizing: the basket never seems full! 

Spinach leaves, painstakingly handpicked

As we were picking, I asked Dave how many leaves it might take to get us to 7lb and so he regrettably did the math: if one leaf weighs 2 grams, and there's 28 grams/ounce, 16oz in a pound, times 7 pounds comes to a whopping 1,568 leaves. I put it out of mind. Instead I asked Laurie how chickens makes eggs:

Hens produce one egg a day naturally and if a rooster gets a hankering for a lady bird, he does his thing while the egg is still soft inside of her before it gets the hard shell, fertilizes the egg and makes a chick. But mostly the hens don't get knocked up so the egg develop the hard shell, plops out, and you grab it for an unbelievably delicious breakfast (see above).


Next we washed the greens in four finger-numbing cold water rinses. Laurie heard of a great way to spin-dry the veggies (they need to be dry because dampness will make them wilt faster) without having to use the hand-crank salad spinner: a washing machine on spin cycle! So she and Dave worked their magic on her new-used washer, got it set up and going, and voila! - a motorized spinner. Should speed up drying immensely.

 

After picking and washing, we made the most of the day's good weather - it's been miserable and rain is forecast all week - and planted three varieties of beets. You basically stick your finger deep in the dirt to make a hole, put the little guy in it, and make another hole three inches away. We put in a couple of rows and called it a day at 5.

Beets a cubicle.  (Get it?!)

Since it was such a beautiful day, we took off after work for a hike around the rest of the farm we hadn't seen yet. The farm is huge.  We met the horses, donkeys and the neighbor's cattle.

Risky and Dave

Pinch me: I live here!

It was momentary madness when we returned to the house to clean up and eat dinner. (Laurie and Billy had a meeting in Bozeman tonight so it was just us). Laurie has two dogs and one very skittish foster dog CJ. CJ and Jane took off when we opened the door and we couldn't get them back in the house! Jane hasn't taken a liking to Dave yet so once I got her corralled and back in, CJ took off across the road and into the neighbor's pasture.  I called after him but it only made him run farther. I thought we were doomed... "Sorry, Laurie, you leave us for one night and we lose your dog"... then it occurred to me how much he seemed to like Boo. So we brought Boo out and used her as bait. Sure enough, Boo wagged her pretty tail off on the porch and CJ came galloping back to the yard to see her.  Score one for Boo.

Off to enjoy Dave's stuffed poblano peppers and have an early night. Sore, tired and sunburned.