Lou's Musings

Who Nose?

I just have to get this one down before I forget it. We have a behavioral problem in one of our chicken tractors: somebody is eating freshly laid eggs. The clues are a slimy yellow goo on the straw bedding; no sign of egg shells, so whoever it is eats it all.

I mentioned this to Jesus our Vineyard Manager, and as is his style he had a ready solution. Back home in Mexico they grab the culprit chicken and poke a straw up its nostril (yes, chickens have nostrils too). Seems it prevents the mischief either from the horrible embarrassment of having a straw up your nose, as in A Fish Called Wanda, or it hurts like hell when you peck anything.

So now how do I figure out who's doing it?

Water Buffalo School

Susan and I took a recent rare vacation, this time to Vietnam. It was a walking tour that took us into the countryside which I much enjoyed for its glimpse into traditional farming. One of the features that we noted was the use of water buffalo as draft animals, although we also got the sense that South East Asia is modernizing with fossil-fueled tractors, both 4 wheeled like ours and two wheeled walk-behinds.

Our suspicions were reinforced by an article in the Bangkok Post which we picked up courtesy of Bangkok Airways flying into and out of Vietnam. The story was about a recently established school in Thailand for training buffaloes to plough farm land. We've long forgotton draft horses; I guess they're hoping not to forget their water buffalo.

 

Lost Cause Kid

Our daughter Maggie says that if this picture (that she took) doesn't get me going again on my blog, I'm a lost cause. I guess that's a good name for "Boy", the one we are planning to eat.

Lost Cause is one of three goat triplets born in February to Trixie, a Togenburg dairy goat. Since there are three mouths to feed, mine--the fourth--is not yet one of them. Clio and Calliope are girls, all are cute as buttons although they are growing by leaps and bounds and are leaping and bounding all over us when we sit on the ground to enjoy their antics.

Holism on the Farm

I'm hoping to take this discussion in an entirely new direction. It has to do with integrity and completeness of our farming operation and it comes from some frustrations that Susan and I have experienced in recent years, especially as we have made the transition to organic agriculture.

A grapegrower has certain skills, expectations, and protocols, but I have come to believe that in total they do not constitute farming. Back when I began this crazy game, I was a student of viticulture at UC Davis and a witness to the inane policies of our racially-bigoted Secretary of Agriculture "get big or get out" Earl Butz. As a star-struck novice grapegrower I was oblivious to academia being more focused on the externalities and infrastructure of farming, like what equipment to use and how to accommodate chemical management, rather than on issues of soil husbandry and environmental health.  Academia hasn't changed much; I think that emphasis is still true today. But we've changed.

To be continued.

I'm Back

Have I said this before?

After a long hiatus I'm picking up my pen to flail myself back into action. It's been a year or more, the last entries coming from Susan and inspired by our trip to Morocco. We did indeed learn from that supposedly underdeveloped country. Not so much how we should live our lives and conduct our polity. More about where we've come from, how humble is in fact noble, how simple is an abstraction of complex.

Tripping out in Morocco

Susan and I have had a hiatus from farming... during April and May we went on a guided walking trek in Morocco ranging from the souks of Fez to mule paths of the Atlas Mountains.

I'm handing over this portion of LousMusings to Susan to share with you her artists eye and alert you to the Evil Eye that lurks in that enchanting and enchanted country. It's not farming but it fits right in.

Lou

Evil Eye Talk

Moroccans wear the Hand of Fatima around their necks. They hang the Hand of Fatima inside their house or at the entrance. For all I know they hang the Hand of Fatima in their cars and on their camels.

Allah is Mystery

Midday we were drinking mint tea at a nearly empty coffee house in the Middle Atlas when we heard the call of the Imam to pray. A boy who worked there, he must have been about fifteen, immediately pulled out his rug, placed it in front of the bar facing North and bent down to pray. In another corner of the cafe, a Moroccan man in his twenties sat at a table with his expresso smoking a cigarette and watching an MTV show of a nearly naked woman gyrating to hard rock. There is a naturalness to this scene that is hard to explain. How can a culture whose words and daily actions are so threaded with Islamic belief also be so tolerant of other ways of being.

Two Wives One Restaurant

Although I was often told that men did not generally take extra wives any longer because of the expense and emotional conflict, I did see an example of a husband and two wives in the souk in Fez.

Smelly Woman

”Have you ever smelled a geranium?”

”We call our geraniums Khadoug Kanza. That means ‘smelly woman.’ When you meet a woman and she is dressed beautifully, neat and clean and all made up and then you visit her in her home and it is a terrible mess... Well then we call her Khadoug Kanza.”

“It was the French, you know, who brought the geranium to our country - definitely not my favorite flower.”

Musings from Saida