Locking It In

I got an email from the Pilgrim Office in St. Jean Pied de Port last week.  It said their doors are open till 10:30 on Saturday nights and the hostel will have plenty of room on March 19, no reservation required.  That means my schedule is good.  I will arrive in St. Jean just in time for supper under a full moon, and when I step onto the St. James Trail the next morning, it will be on the first day of spring.

If I felt uncertain about this trip, I feel certain now.  With such omens, surely the wind will lie calm on the mountain and there will be no snow.  Not right there where the trail begins its steep scramble into the French Pyrenees or where it crosses the pass to Spain.  The signs say the sky will light my path; winter will give way to spring.  They tell me to pull up AA.com on my laptop and lock in my plane tickets.  And so I do.
  

Gwynn is the bad one.

But, Good Lord, there is so much more to be locked in here before I go.  I have to get everything ready on the farm so Fred and our petsitters can manage it while I am gone.  That means putting up permanent fencing around my donkey pasture to replace the electric wire Gwynn keeps walking through.  I have to put new sawdust in the stalls and lay in enough hay to last till I get home.  I have to introduce my donkeys and horse very gradually to spring grass.  If they graze too long in the beginning, they will founder.

I have to fill the freezer with quick dinners -- pot pies and quiche and tomato sauce -- because, as long as he is feeding and mucking in addition to going to work every day, Fred won't have much time to cook.  I have to iron shirts and hang the new tv on the wall.  I have to clean the chicken house, buy grain and sunflower seeds, and fill all the feeders.  I need to put a flotation device in the donkey trough to make it refill automatically.  I need new automatic waterers for the chickens, too; the current ones leak.

 

Our garden has six beds like these.

At the last minute, I'll need to plant my spring garden: bok choi, beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, greens, lettuce, onions, spinach, and green peas -- lots of green peas.  We'll have to till it with the tractor and rotovator because I put so much sawdust and manure on it over the winter.  Then we'll cover the tilled ground with newspapers and cover the newspapers with mulch to lock in the moisture and prevent weeds from coming up.  Thank goodness, that system works like a charm; Fred won't have to do a thing in the garden while I'm gone, except maybe harvest some of the greens.  I'll be home in plenty of time to put in the summer beds.


Maybe by mid-March

But right now, today, I need to start seeds for my broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage, so I can get them in the ground before I leave.  I start my own because our chickens make store-bought transplants so expensive.  One way or another, they usually manage to break into the garden and eat our first spring planting and sometimes even the second; three rounds of store-bought plants can add up to $15 to $30, and that's too much.  So, I start my own.  A $1.97 pack of seeds will make plenty for our birds, for us, and for our freezer, and of course, we like to share when we can.


This pink lady slipper is our favorite native plant.

I have to plant more native shrubs, too, and make wire cages to protect them from the deer.  After battling invasive vegetation on our farm for 10 years, we are just now coming free of it; and we're finding it's at least as hard to restore the natives as it was to get rid of the invasives.  The deer eat everything we plant because there is so little else for them now that the native understory is gone.  And, of course, as long as we have no understory, there will be erosion.  So I am trying to restore the plants, and right now is the season.

At least I won't have to worry about it over the spring because I'll be gone. 

Bueno, eh?