Touring the neighbor's garden
"Hey,
Junior, would you mind moving off the road?" Maybe I wasn't being
polite enough, because the calf just stuck out his tongue at me.
I was on my way over to
my movie star neighbor's farm to stream
monitor when I had my bovine encounter. The folks who live in
my neighbor's intentional community spend a lot of their time off the
farm, so they let their neighbor run his beef cattle
on their fields in exchange for working on their driveway. This
calf clearly wasn't used to having anyone in his turf, but he ambled 
away
when I inched my car up to his snout.
After freezing our feet
in the Clinch River, we all headed inside to warm up and enthuse over
my neighbor's stunning dwarf
Meyer lemon tree. The lemon has its own alcove (as well as a
patio where it spends its summers) and, as you can see, the tree is
completely laden with fruit. Upstairs, ten baby lemon trees are
growing up while 57 butternuts and a slew of sweet potatoes cure in the
risen warmth.
Later,
we headed down to the garden to see a surprise trio of extremely late
tomatoes. My neighbor stuck the volunteer seedlings in the ground
a month and a half ago and has been covering them with a tarp during
frosty nights. Despite getting a bit nipped on the edges, huge
tomatoes are hanging in the middle of the vines. My neighbor is
bound and determined to pick a ripe tomato on Thanksgiving, and I'm
keen on seeing how his experiment goes.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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