What a week last week was. Sunshine and even eating lunch outside….champagne by the river. Get me.
This week, slightly butcher business. Mowing in the tractor…and you know how driving the tractor makes me feel. Planting trees. And strimming.
I have a love/hate relationship with the strimmer. It’s similar to stripping and sanding a door* – the prospect of doing something vaguely creative, with a real visual reward at the end gets me disproportionately excited. I start, I love it…. then the mid-job lull… then up again by the end. I find a well-timed Snickers helps alleviate these symptoms a little.
Today, all went well – I cleared a vast area around and between the szechaun peppers….however, I failed to observe the third of the three simple rules of strimmer operation and paid the price.
The flowering edible honeysuckle (above) provided almost no consolation.
*as in stripping a door and then sanding the door…I remain fully clothed throughout
So, was it a frog or slug? or can't you tell the difference yet?
🙂
Anyway, onto a further question in my search for fruit-farming education. I believe that you said that you farmed 17 acres. You clearly have access to a fair degree of machinary (iron horse and strimmer at the least). Is 17 acres the sort of size that you can comfortably manage (I haven't seen you referring to hired hands, so presumably on your own)? When everything is mature and fruiting will you be able to handle harvesting all the stuff – is that the main work? or is weeding/maintenance more time-consuming?
Peter.
P.S. I'm disappointed that you don't sand in the nude – I find it does spice things up byu adding an element of risk to the operation. 🙂
Sanding and stripping are perfectly acceptable nude activities (although one should beware of drippy Nitromors).
Other occupations at ease with nudity are light weeding, lawn mowing (walk behind or ride-on), compost heap turning, edging and earthing up of celery.
Unwise nude activities include gooseberry picking, strimming (as you point out), rose pruning, berberis coppicing, log splitting, electric fence climbing, operating a Wacker plate (too much vibration), sheep shearing, fox hunting and harvesting nettles for soup.
Unless, of course, you are Matthew Wilson in which case nudity is almost mandatory.
Peter: slug last week, frog last year. Gag reflex needs some work. 17 acres isnt soemthing you can scomfortably manage on your own…i do it on my own but I have a mix of ridiculous enthusiasm about it and the ability to let it look crap if i cant get round to things as quicklly as i like. It's a smallholdng rtaher than a big garedn, so tatty, rough as helleven, is often the order of the day. Plus everything is young and not seriously productive so there's no income from it, and i've a big mortgage and a small family…so it gets done when it gets done, but long days and long weeks are the norm, fun as they may be. I'll certainly need help picking etc, but there seems a surbrpising (to me nayway) nuber of people who want to spend the day doing it just for the fun of it. When it comes to the vines, i think their payment will be fairly obvious!
James A-S: always make me laugh…the Wacker plate image in particular
excuse the late-in-the-evening spelling!
ohhhhh how precious steve last but not least got a brain