I'm now a week into the job, and I have turned two massive piles of compost, planted a wheat field, made fish nets, filled a raised bed, and cooked with wild chives that I picked on the estate. Quite the skill set, I must say. We have four acres that we're working on, as well as a gristmill about three miles down the road, and we do every step of the process. Come July, we'll harvest the wheat and start treading it in the barn, then take it over to the mill (the mill cheats a little bit and supplements with purchased grain). We're also growing potatoes, corn, oats, buckwheat (which will just be plowed under as green manure), cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, herbs for different uses, and also cotton and tobacco (mostly for demo purposes). Right now, everything that needs to be in the ground is already planted, without much need for maintenance, so we're making fish nets. We'll hopefully be going fishing in the next couple of weeks, wading in the Potomac. We may or may not just do catch and release.
Next month, we'll be shearing the sheep, then washing, combing, dyeing, and spinning. I think the weaving comes in September. I'm pretty excited, and hoping I can score some of the reddish brown wool from some of the Hog Island sheep. I made friends with one of the rams yesterday. They may be dumb, but they are cute. They're just so wooly this time of year! (This hasn't diminished my taste for lamb one bit).
In my own garden, things are starting to happen. I have lots of small seedlings that I'm hoping will survive: Arkansas Traveller tomatoes, Old Virginia tomatoes, Rutgers tomatoes (all heirlooms, and the first two are supposed to do well in heat and be split-resistant, a big problem here); red and white cabbage; marigolds, nasturtiums, and tansy. I also had a great big shipment of plants come yesterday, a bunch of culinary herbs and creeping thymes for a border, as well as kale and leeks. I'm pretty excited for the bounty of the harvest both here and at work!
