Gray and the WWOOFers (Ricardo and Cecelia) harvested several rows of garlic from the back field. The garlic was bunched, labeled and loaded into our neighbors barn for drying.  From there, the bulbs will be combed through for next year’s seed garlic.  The rest will go to market, into CSA boxes and into our meals.

Transport happens with the Safety 1st kid carrier and the farm bike. The kid carrier has hauled a wide array of items – food and tools on the farm, groceries in the city. I picked it up for free in Wilmington a billion years ago. It, like me, has seen its share of work.

After unloading, Kristin and I shared the view from the barn doors on the upper level.

And I got to act like I was jumping down to intercept Brother…

My weekends have evaporated into something that I have yet to name.  They have become something that I enjoy – warm, heavy with work and chores, meaningful in the way that objectives are completed. But at the same time, there can be come tedious monotony in the day, a weird existence in blisters and staring down a long row of uninterrupted wild garlic.

Then, between the chickweed and the grass clumps, the first strawberry flower of the year comes into peripheral vision.  I stop. I stop and I think deeply. At some point this flower will turn into a berry, starting off white and green and solid.  From there the fruit moves into pink and on into deep red, the yellow seeds dimpling the fruit in diamond patterns.  Someone will eat it.  It could quite possibly be me or someone else from Circle Acres. Or it could be a CSA member or a market customer.

Not a big deal.  It is just a strawberry.

But it is a big deal when I think on it some more. We are growing something that someone is going to put in their bodies. They are going to use the sugar and vitamins in that berry to do things. They will walk to the mailbox or push in the clutch or scramble an egg using the energy from that berry. When I sat there weeding and thinking about that flower and following it through its development and on through the blood vessels and organs and paths of digestion and protein building and ATP and the breaking and formation of energy bonds and cell walls and divisions and… Well, it all made me a bit insane for a second.  I had to catch myself, get my head back together.

It is just one strawberry.

Saturday morning the first set of piglets were born on Okfuskee Farm.  Okfuskee is just a few miles from Circle Acres and the source of the first pigs we raised last year.  This year we are getting four pigs from Okfuskee.  We’ll raise them through November, repeating most of the same process as last year.

This year there is a new shelter, a scavenged bamboo and baling twine number that I built over the course of a few days.  It isn’t much to look at, but it is dry and, more importantly, lightweight.  Moving last year’s pig house was a nightmare.  It was heavy and unwieldy; I cursed it, the pigs destroyed it as they aged, knocking out the floor and the walls.  Now its shell sits with last year’s scarecrow along the forest edge, waiting for new purposes and locations.

The new house is basically a tent with one open wall.  It can be staked down after moving in case it is windy.  But that is all boring stuff… Who wants to see the two day old piglets!

Five weeks from this coming Saturday the piglets will be weaned (according to the Animal Welfare Approved time line).  Shortly after that, the pigs will come home and join the rest of us animals.

We at Circle Acres are committed scavengers. Group dumpster runs are part of the fabric of our collective. These runs provide needed goods for the farm as well as plenty of food for shared meals.

Scavenging also includes gleaning scrap lumber from neighboring demolition projects, concrete pieces (urbanite), old greenhouse plastic, bamboo, hay twine, nails, and irrigation drip tape. Combine all those elements and you get a really decent and basic greenhouse.

The process started with a bamboo harvest – this ingredient was necessary for putting together the top framing as well as the side ribs.

The ends of the greenhouse were built with downed cedar trees that we pulled out of the woods as well as scrap lumber from a demolition up the road from us.  There were also a few pieces from a recent gutting of a few rooms in our house.

The plastic came from an organic farm near the NC coast as did the drip tape that was used to staple through and hold the plastic to the framing.

Photo from Danielle

Total cost for this greenhouse (not including labor of course) is somewhere between $5 and $15 depending on who you ask.  I think the staples were at least $4 for the box, but calculating how many nails were purchased versus how many were scavenged is difficult.

Regardless, the greenhouse is ready for seed flats and a jump-start on the season.  Anyone interested in our CSA?