I started off my season at Cerridwen Farm with so many plans. Back in May I remember professing that I would make cheese every other day, learn to spin, stay on top of all the weeding, read a hundred different books on sheep health and plant breeding, create an experimental garden, go contra dancing every other weekend... and of course, write this blog. Now it's nearly July and except for a few chapters of Gary Paul Nabhan's Coming Home to Eat and three batches of mozzarella, I've checked none of those lofty goals off my summer to-do list.
But hope is not lost, for the month of July is the ideal "catch-up" time in farming. Sandwiched between the rush of spring and early summer planting and the explosion of produce in August, it's the perfect time for building bunny hutches, mending hoses, and other non-urgent projects (as well as some much needed off-farm diversions). It should be interesting to see how many of those July plans turn into winter projects or things to shoot for next season. Is the idea of staying on top of things on the farm really such an impossible dream?
Today seems like a fitting day to start my sojourn into the blogging world. I spent the majority of my day sitting inside on the computer instead of outside in the drizzly muggy mess because I managed to pull a very important muscle pretty badly over the weekend. This experience definitely taught me that I should be a bit more careful with myself. If I want to be doing this long term, I've got to take care of the body I've got. I only get one. The day of office work also reminded me that there's quite a lot more to running a farm besides the obvious planting, cultivating, and harvesting. There's marketing, managing, researching, organizing, recording... it's these things that make a farm into a business. And you know what, today I even learned that I'm okay with that. Who would have though office work could feel like a nice little break?
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