the f word
In my limited farming experience, February is where things start to spin out of control. This is the point in the winter where the wildlife on the farm are tired of fending for themselves and decide to move into the barn and eat our animal feed and/or animals. Right on time a raccoon the size of a Labrador has moved into the barn. I know instagram is packed with cute raccoon videos and people keep them as pets and their little faces and little hands, etc., but I HATE them. They move into your barn with all of their extended families and then they murder and dismember (not necessarily in that order) your rabbits and chickens. Also - they stink! Also, they are very "clean" so instead of pooping everywhere, they create a huge pile of poop in one area. Probably in some rarely used corner of the barn, so you stumble across it one day after wondering what the hell that awful smell is for several days/weeks. I have given farm tours to some of our daintier friends who complain about the farm smells, but let me assure you, the difference between the smell of beautiful sheep manure and raccoon scat is like night and day. Our city friends probably wouldn't survive!
An additional worry about our raccoon squatter is that this area is rampant with rabid animals. At the flower farm across the road they have had two foxes with confirmed rabies. One even followed the neighbor and their dog INTO their mudroom to attack them - at like 2:00 in the afternoon! Scary stuff. In both instances the sick foxes picked fights with their hound dog, so this is even more scary for the safety of our cancer patient / superdog. The raccoon has to go, but so far has eluded us. Hopefully the added attention will inspire it to move along.
This is a very clumsy segue, but I wanted to talk about the flower farm across the road today! You know? The one with the rabid foxes? All summer we enjoyed their incredible bouquets as their one and only CSA member (to clarify - not only customer, they just don't offer a CSA to their farm market customers). We are extra fortunate that our membership includes delivery and chit chat! The flowers are gorgeous and the bouquets are unbelievably beautiful. I have no skill for this - I tend to stick to large bouquets of the same flower when I make centerpieces, so they are extra impressive. Feast your eyes on a sampling of their work!
I wasn't lying, right? I couldn't bear to part with these beauties when they started looking sad, so I hung almost everything to dry. I didn't know which, if any, would dry well but I figured it was worth a shot. Then, in an unrelated incident, I used those stick on hooks that don't damage drywall to hang some pine garland. In the most predictable outcome ever, the hooks damaged the drywall and now we are committed to having a garland over the arch in the foyer forever (or until I fix it, but forever is probably accurate). Thankfully we had a ton of dried flowers to make a swaggy garland!
I also had enough flowers to make this wreath for the inside of the front door. Luckily the lighting is better here and you can see how gorgeous the flowers look. Amazing, right?