Monthly Archives: June 2017

June update 2017

Still under a time crunch but feel I should get a few thoughts down before they vanish entirely. Spending a lot of time lately thinking about how to get the Fischer Farm started, and spending even more time lately working in the motion picture industry building all sorts of crazy pipe dreams. Can’t talk about that so much on account of all the NDAs I don’t remember signing, so I’ll have to reserve this space for farm dreams, which is kind of what the blog title was supposed to suggest.

Farming is real hard work and I’ve never had any illusions to the contrary. The Fischer Farm isn’t hardly ready for growing anything yet but sometimes you have to charge ahead just to get the momentum to do what you want to do. If it were up to me I would sow three acres in clover and let it sit two years while we figured out the rest of the plan, but right now we’re going 1/4 acre in pumpkins. Maybe. The seeds aren’t in the ground yet and I don’t know when I’ll have time to get around to it. I’ve got a farmer in charge of that 1/4 acre but he’s a little tied up with his own life these days. I won’t get into the particular setbacks that we’ve run into but there have been at least a few, and a lost day here or there is a big deal when you’re dependent upon the weather cooperating with a very limited schedule. There are bigger and longer term plans in the works, but I don’t want to spoil those details until they’re at least a little more fleshed out.

I decided to skip the Permaculture Design Certification course I was planning on taking this summer. I also bailed on a recent trip to KTD in Woodstock that I had been looking forward to since Winter. Both decisions were financially dictated. It’s feast or famine in the film biz, and while I’ve been working like a hurt dog lately, there were too many months in a row with no money coming in. Now I have to make up for lost time, and skipping town for two weeks just isn’t viable, even if it is in the interest of furthering other projects. Lama Karma was in town the other weekend, and while I was still too busy to even attend his teaching, I did at least get him to bestow a long life blessing upon My Bunniness. I opted to spend a small portion of the money that I won’t be spending attending the PDC and went in on an order of cover crop seed and two flats of goldenrod for the Fischer Farm. Thank you Johnny’s Seeds and Prairie Moon Nursery. Scored discounts on both orders. Somewhere in those two weeks I would have been gone I hope to find a day to get those plants and seeds in the ground.

My plot in East Garfield Park is looking all right even if the kitties and the workload haven’t been helping things along. I did get some more starts in the ground today, and the first Prairie Moon order I received is mostly thriving. The Liatris mostly got scorched but one or two are looking strong. Comfrey is thriving all over the yard and I have a few different strains of nettles growing. The chamomile is even coming back around now that I’ve got soaker hoses installed. Bought a new daisy, a Becky, and the seller told me she was pretty sure it was from Elite Growers. I keep track of that sort of thing on account of my years in the industry and watching which plants have thrived and which have fizzled in my urban gardens. I’m looking to cultivate several strong daisies after last winter killed off most of those I’ve had growing anywhere.

Tomorrow I’m heading to the Farm to build a bonfire that I’m going to light off on Friday night for Family Camp. Had a real successful work day at the Fischer Farm over Memorial Day weekend and camped over with a few of my friends. Decided after that weekend that it’s important to get to know all of the folks who have a connection to that place, and while I probably don’t have time to camp out again this weekend I can play Fire Marshall for a few hours one evening. Hoping I don’t get too much time off anytime soon on account of all those bills I still haven’t paid, but I have made some solid additions to my library lately and I’m looking forward to working my way through those texts eventually. Will be fun to report back.

That’s all I’ve got tonight. Haven’t really gotten down with adding photos to the blog lately so here’s a video. Not my work..

Loss Leader

This week I lost a number of seedlings. A tray I had been cold stratifying in the fridge up and germinated before I noticed and half of those babies died. Harvesting weeds for My Bunniness at 4 a.m. the other morning I accidentally uprooted the cilantro I’d been nursing from seed and had just transplanted. Today I came home and found that the neighborhood feral kitties had ransacked the trays I’d been hardening off and had planned to get planted tomorrow.

I’ve been working 60 hour weeks for too long now, and I’m keeping those hours low on account of I refuse to work weekends. Guys I work with are losing fingers and winding up in the hospital on an all too frequent basis. In the grand scheme of things I’m keeping my losses to a minimum, but there’s definitely a cost associated with keeping these hours. It’s heavy on my mind but I still haven’t come up with a better way to pay the bills. I’ll chalk my lost seedlings up to poor timing and note the experience, and I’ll continue to spend whatever spare seconds I can find throughout the week working out a better plan. It’s going to be a rough haul any way it works out. Hopefully I can still get those sunflowers planted this summer.

There are moments in all the chaos where tranquility just happens. On Saturday I got to drive a 1937 Allis Chalmers tractor around the Fischer Farm. I spotted a Monarch butterfly and tried to keep up with it for a while, jerking that big orange machine around the field as my target flitted and then vanished. It was but an instant but I’ll probably still recall that moment decades from now. Space gets bigger in moments like those and there’s room for all the aggravation and heartache to disappear. Almost room enough to lose sixty hours in.