Photo by Pixabay/onefox
I don’t know why, but
somehow I think of myself as a lazy farmer. Perhaps it is because I know that I
am not a real farmer. Sure, we ate out of the garden all summer and I sold our
excess produce at the farmer’s market, but gardening is hardly farming. And the
crops that I love the most, I do not even need to plant! My maple trees grow
collect the sap and boil it down into delicious maple syrup. And my bees really
take care of themselves. They fly miles to gather all of the nectar that they work
so hard to transform into honey. What do I do? I simply collect the honey
filled frames from the hives, turn them a few spins in our hand cranked
extractor, and bottle up liquid gold. The bees do all the real work.
I am so lazy that I even
have a friend who delivers compost material in five gallon buckets right to my
barn door. When I used to commute to and from the city five days a week, I
would stop by two downtown coffee shops each morning and exchange an empty five
gallon bucket for one they had filled the day before with used coffee grounds. I
was sad to retire from that city job, not because I would miss my place of
employment, but because I would no longer have daily access to two five gallon
buckets filled with coffee grounds that I could feed to my compost pile. I
mentioned this sadness to a friend who replied that he was downtown twice a
week and would happily pick up and deliver the buckets!
But my friend drops off
the buckets in the evening, and by winter’s morning, when I head down to the
barn to feed the nitrogen rich coffee grounds to my compost pile, the damp
grounds are frozen fast to the inside of the buckets. I jump and stomp and
throw the buckets as hard as I can at the cold ground, and after an amazingly
long work out, the cylindrical form of five gallons worth of rock hard coffee
grounds falls solidly onto my compost pile. An hour later I realize that I have
finally emptied five buckets.
Then the maple trees need
their gallon milk jugs emptied. This should be easy. I park the pickup truck on
the road and head down to my sugar bush. Each bucket hangs on a tap that I have
gently hammered into a hole drilled into the tree. Well, the sap has flowed,
and filled up each jug, and then it has frozen as solid as the coffee grounds,
frozen solid around the taps! I check out each tapped tree, fifteen in all. Fifteen
rock hard gallon jugs firmly attached to each tree. I guess that I’ll just have
to hope for a bit of a thaw tomorrow to get the buckets off of the trees.
Well, what about the
bees? I head up to the apiary. It has warmed up to about fourteen degrees by
now. The wind bites into my face and threatens to cut off my ears. The hives stand
all in a row at the top edge of the upper field. I kneel down and put my frozen
ear up against the first frozen hive. I hear a low, gentle hum. The bees are
alive. I brush off the snow from their entrance to allow air circulation,
condensation inside a hive is not a good thing, and also to allow the bees to
get out if the weather warms up enough for them to fly. I kneel by all ten
hives and brush off each entrance. All is thankfully well in the bee yard.
By now I have been
outside in the mostly single digit weather for over three hours. My toes are as
frozen as the coffee grounds. My ears must have fallen off because I can’t feel
a thing and I know that it is time for this lazy farmer to head inside and brew
a hot cup of late morning coffee.
Christine Tailer presented a workshop at the Seven Springs, Pa. MOTHER EARTH NEWS FAIR.
Please visit the FAIR website
for more information about future FAIRs: June 1-2 in Puyallup, Wash.,
Sept. 20-22 in Seven Springs, Pa., and Oct. 12-13 in Lawrence, Kan. Tickets are on sale now.
You can also get FAIR updates on our Facebook and Twitter pages.
