In West Virginia At Last

I haven't posted here in a while ... Lots of things have been happening. Not bad things, just things that drain my time and motivation to write blog posts.

First, I got a new job! I'm working at a local garden center ten minutes from my house. I worked four days last week to get some training before I left for two weeks to stay at my last WWOOF farm.

On Sunday, my mom and I drove to Morgantown, WV, to check it out, since I thought I wanted to move there in the fall. Turns out, I really don't, but we had some good conversations with a couple Morgantown-ers–a lady in the nondairy ice cream section at Kroger and a waitress at Pies and Pints (which was right next to a Krogers that was two minutes from where we were staying and which we didn't even realize was there the night before ...)

We had a fun night in our Airbnb, eating ice cream and watching Brave. 

On Monday we drove to the farm I'm staying at, Possum Tail Farm. I almost got right back in the car and went back to Maryland; I was feeling anxious and overwhelmed about the future and at the moment, settling into a new routine with a new family seemed like a terrifying, insurmountable task. Mommy and Jennie, the wife and mom of the family, convinced me to stay, though, and I'm glad I did, although I am planning on leaving a couple of days early.

Possum Tail Farm has beef cattle, chickens, one dog, and one cat. Plus a lot of garden space, including some herb beds for chocolate mint, lemon balm, calendula, etc. One thing it does not have is ticks. The elevation is too high for them. There are chipmunks, though.

This is the first farm I've stayed at that has a separate building for wwoofers. I was unsure about the tiny house at first, as it is a bit plain inside, but once we put up curtains and I put my blankets on the bed, I warmed up to it. Now I quite like it. It gets pretty chilly at night, but there's a heater in the house so I turn that on in the morning when I wake up, which is usually around six. 

I've lived through four springs now in 2021: One in Maryland, two in Virginia, and one in West Virginia.

Today I have the afternoon off, so I'm taking the time to do some remote work for Honey's Harvest Farm, do school, and read.

This morning Brian taught me how to drive the tractor.

As with most new things I try, I was scared at first, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly and quite enjoyed it after that. (We were filling in low spots in one of the pastures.)

So far we've planted two pear trees, weeded, planted sweet potato slips, watered the greenhouse, tried to power wash the outdoor shower, emptied the compost onto the piles, picked trash out of the woods (part of the farm used to be a dump; I found a key!), hauled heavy plastic sheeting over one garden site to germinate and then kill any weed seeds in the soil, put up electric fencing and moved the cows into new pasture, and put buckets of mushroom compost onto the garden (not in this order – this was just as I thought of things we've done).

I think I'm working harder on this farm than I have on any of the others. Working and living on many different farms, both locally and with WWOOF, has given me an idea of the methods I like and don't like. (Is it possible to farm without miles of plastic sheeting?) 

I know farming is hard work, but after reading The One-Straw Revolution I know it doesn't have to be so hard; if I had to work like this every day, I think I'd grow to hate farming. Really what I want is to have my own piece of land so I can try out "do-nothing farming" (Masanobu Fukuoka's term, not mine) for myself. I still want to farm, but I want to enjoy it.

That's it for now. Except, here are a few chipmunk pictures I took while I was sitting here writing this blog post. Sorry they aren't great quality, but I figured blurry chipmunks were better than no chipmunks ;)