Dove Season

When I was a kid these were the three harbingers of fall: Uncle Pat started picking corn, we had the annual Harvest Sale at my church (shameless plug the harvest sale is at Providence UMC in Mar Mac on Sat. Sept. 9 from 4:30-7:30, eat in or take out, BBQ and turkey, the best you’ll ever eat at a church function.  Uncle Pat’s in charge of the pigs and that sauce is to-die-for.  See me for tickets 😊), and on Labor Day weekend dove season came in.

I grew up on an almost mile long state-maintained dirt road with no other houses on it (except for the migrant workers Uncle Pat had when he raised tobacco).  All summer long we’d be surrounded by wheat, soybeans, and yes, corn.  It’s a bird paradise.  Hunting was a part of my life, my step-dad went, my step-brother, my uncle, my granddaddy, my cousin would even come from Chapel Hill and go…it was/is a big thing for my family.  We always had a dove hunt on my uncle’s farm, but when he became involved with Quail Unlimited it became massive.  He started planting sunflowers for them (and I fell in love with those beautiful yellow blooms of sunshine).  The fields around our house sounded like a war zone or something, all these men in camo shooting like crazy at these poor beautiful birds.  We couldn’t walk outside without orange on.  And for Sunday lunch my mama would fry them and smother them in gravy.  Those poor beautiful birds were pretty dang delicious. 

This is NOT my picture, but for those of you who aren't sure what a dove is, this is a great picture of them.

Ever since we started opening our farm to visitors we’ve had people ask about hunting it.  In the past, it’s always been a family thing.  The Husband and his three close cousins hunted it.  It’s always been a good place to hunt.  We have a swamp on the side favored by ducks.  We have a river that abuts the back of the property that the deer and such run down.  Anyone who’s come to the corn maze has seen evidence of their tracks through the maze.  The Husband’s always been turning over the idea of leasing out the hunting rights or hosting hunts on the farm to bring us in some additional revenue.  We have this amazing resource here that we have to make a payment on every year, why not use every opportunity to do it? 

They love hanging out on this fence.  The Girl says they want to play on the playground.

 Honestly, I’ve always been a little tentative to go the hunting route.  First off, I’m not a hunter.  I can understand the peace and solitude that people get from hunting and I enjoy the meat, but I think it has to be the most boring thing in the planet.  I went deer hunting a few times.  You get up at the crack before it’s light in the cold and go sit in a tree for hours being super quiet and still possibly to see nothing.  I just don’t see the appeal.  Second off, it’s a huge liability.  You’re going to let people with loaded guns ready to shoot them on your land.  What if there’s an accident?  Third, my plate is so full trying to organize and market our fall activities, plus my house, plus my kids, plus just life in general, I just don’t know how I can fit anything else on it (my wonderful CSA helper Melissa said to me yesterday, you need an assistant.  Yes, yes I do.  I just can’t afford one).  However, the birds have been CRAZY on the farm this year. Even I’ve noticed that every time I ride to the farm I scare up at least 20 dove if not more and that’s just by riding by on my truck.  The combination of the sunflowers and a wheat crop we weren’t able to harvest (don’t ask, it’s a sore subject) has made the perfect environment for a dove.  Not to mention since we’ve lived here (7 years) they’ve not been hunted on this farm, so they haven’t been conditioned to avoid it.  Sunday my husband counted fifty in fifteen minutes out of the back of the berry shed and 2 customers mentioned they saw 30 while they were standing there taking pictures. 

I felt like I was working for National Geographic trying to catch this one on my poor phone. 

So this year we’re hosting our first ever dove hunt.  If it goes well maybe we’ll open the farm up to duck and deer hunting.  Hopefully it will.  We’ve got a good lunch planned and a couple tickets sold so far we’re optimistic.  If you're interested in joining us, call JR at 919-738-2928 or shoot us an email at odomfarmingcoinc@gmail.com.  We'd love to have you out!

And I had to include a sunflower picture, just because!

#tastythursday

I don't want to become a food blogger.  With my discriminating palate and crazy schedule I can't ever count on when we're having Japanese takeout or shrimp alfredo or fried chicken (which, honestly we don't have too much because it doesn't matter what I do or how I cook it I NEVER get every piece done through.  Instead I batter and fry boneless skinless chicken thighs.  It's not the same, but it's daggone close to me).  

However in support of my #tastythursday segment on Facebook (www.facebook.com/ofcinc) I thought I'd cook tonight using a couple of the things from the CSA boxes this week and see how it went.  I get so many recipe requests I figured my little sheets might not be enough so I decided last year to start #tastythursday on the farm's Facebook in an effort to get people sharing about what they'd cooked this week.  Admittedly (like a lot of the things I do), I started with great intentions that fell off when I got busy (I tend to have a one track mind and if I don't do it RIGHT THEN I'll forget.  I was voted most forgetful in high school even.  Of course the more stressed I get the worse it gets and I have to admit, I've been pretty stressed lately).  But I thought it was a good idea so I've brought it back this year.  I missed last week, my apologies, but I'm on top of it this week so here's my attempt at food blogging.

Tonight The Girl was graduating aka being promoted to the next class at her preschool, so I knew I had to get started cooking earlier than normal so we'd be on time (I'm five minutes late everywhere and it grates on The Husband's nerves).  I decided on grilled boneless skinless chicken thighs marinated all day in Italian dressing, a squash and onion grill packet (thanks Melissa Vera for the idea!) and a cheesy potato grill (PTL for Pintrest!) packet.  The chicken is pretty self-explanatory.  Easy, light, delicious.  You can't go wrong.  The cheesy potatoes I just cut up maybe 2 lbs of potatoes (I peeled mine because I'm picky like that) into cubeish shapes that were on the small side.  I salted and peppered them and added a little Cajun seasoning, then put them in a packet with a tablespoon of bacon grease and 2 of butter (I never claimed they were healthy!), cooked them maybe 20-30 minutes on the grill and then peeled back the foil to add cheese.  If I'd had any thawed out bacon I would have added it instead of the bacon grease.  If I'd have thought about adding dry ranch dressing mix I would have.  Next time my friends, next time!  For the squash and onions I cut up two squash since really it's just The Husband who eats it and half an onion.  I tossed it in the same as the potatoes, salt, pepper, and Cajun seasoning.  I added a clove of garlic that I just smashed and peeled, a tablespoon of bacon grease and two of butter.  I put the packet on the grill and cooked it for the same amount of time as the potatoes.  Basically, I put them on about five minutes before the chicken and when the chicken was done I pulled them off.  Now if you're not picky like my family you could mix the squash packet with the potatoes and I bet it would be wonderful, but we're weird so there you have it.

Before

After

 You know how you have those nights where it doesn't matter what you do supper (The Herrings call lunch dinner and dinner supper.  Welcome to the south) is a fail.  Well, tonight it was anything but.  Everyone ate it like it was the best thing they'd ever ate at The Husband kept saying it was the best thing he'd eaten in a while (which, honestly I could take a couple ways but I'm going with compliment).  I think I've found how I'm going to cook pretty much everything all summer.  I hope you try these.  I thought they turned out pretty good.  And if you have any stellar recipes you'd like to share feel free too!

The 'graduate', and her trusty side-kick.  Matching clothes totally unintentional.

Week 1

Okay y'all, last week I blogged about the Matthew flood and literally A DAY LATER we had another one that was probably 90% of what Matthew was, so, with rain forecast again this week I have promised I will not talk about our second major flood in six months and I will not.  I will post pictures and let them speak for me.

This was taken Wed. evening as the water rose.

Thursday morning we woke up to Lake Odom

The water at it's height covering the back yard.  It was only a few feet lower than the Hurricane.

The canal of water flowing across my neighbors land from the little river onto ours.

 The first week of the 2017 CSA is behind us and it was, well, I'm looking for a better word than disaster and coming up short.  Maybe a semi-disaster.  A couple months ago Wayne UNC Health Care (formally Wayne Memorial Hospital) came up and asked us if we'd be interested in doing a farmers market there at the hospital.  We jumped at the chance even though we'd never done/weren't terribly interested in doing a farmers market.  Honestly, you work and work and work to produce the produce (see what I did there ;) and sell two squash...money wise it's never seemed like a huge win for us.  However I thought it'd be a great chance to get the word out about our CSA and would be a good opportunity.  Finally about a week and a half before we were set to begin I got the green light from the board.  So yesterday my new employee Melissa (of Adventures of Frugal Mom fame) set off.  I was not prepared.  Last week was super stressful because of the flood, then Monday I was horribly sick due to the perfect storm of something emitting pollen and mixing with those crazy winds (I have no voice today.  The Girl got up and said 'what happened to your voice?  Did it float away?  Maybe she has some lingering flood PTSD?).  In an effort to be efficient, I got the bright idea to 'lets pack some deliveries' at the farmers market while we're waiting for customers, so we dragged all out product from the farm with us, then down to the farmers market location (the sunken outdoor patio connected to the cafeteria), then we didn't use as much which meant I could have put that much more in my boxes but I couldn't, because people were already picking up at the farm and it wouldn't be fair.  Not to mention we didn't start deliveries until 3, which is waaaay later than I would like.  It was a huge mistake on my part that left me feeling horrible last night.  I emailed my customers and within minutes I had messages of support back which lightened my mood so much and made it where I could sleep last night (couple years ago I took a MBTI test for the Karl Best Ag Leadership class and got INTJ, when I make mistakes I tend to agonize over them until I come up with a solution).  Another instance of us having the best customers on the planet!

Odom Farming Company TO GO

But, now I know what not to do and what to expect at the farmers market, which I think was a success.  Everyone was excited for us to be there and we were excited for the opportunity.  We have a new plan of attack for next week and I only see good things in our future, even if we started off on the wrong foot.  In the words of Scarlett O'Hara...tomorrow is another day!

Water

I’m going to make a blanket statement here.  I feel like of all the resources in the world, water is the most vital, and with our changing climate it will only get more so.  Without it you cannot survive.  You cannot grow food.  You cannot take care of yourself.  It can be your biggest blessing and your worst enemy.  As I sit here and watch this rain fall today, I know it has been both to me.  We've had years where our location to the swamp and river have proven vital to our survival.  We've had years where I just wished I could spread a tarp over the field and keep the water off the plants.  Farmers say a dry year will hurt you but a wet one will kill you.  I believe it. 

This is the Hurricane Matthew post.  I’ve sat down five or six times to write it.  I tried last fall and couldn’t.  I tried after Christmas and couldn't.  How do you sum up a disaster that big?  How do you convey the feeling in your heart when you drive up to your farm and see it under water?  We were blessed that our home was not hurt.  We were blessed that our families remained unscathed.  We had a lot of things going for us, but we had one big one going against us.  I know to a lot of people what we lost seems like nothing.  It was just a corn maze.  It was just a field of corn.  You can plow it up and plant again.  At least it wasn’t a building.  At least it wasn’t your house.  No, it wasn’t and believe me, I am beyond thankful it wasn’t.  But it was still important to us.  So here’s our Hurricane Matthew story. 

All that week we watched the weather.  It’s a compulsive habit of mine to check the weather every time I get on the computer.  We watched the spaghetti plots and rainfall estimates.  I was glued to every news outlet in Eastern North Carolina, the National Hurricane Center, and even those Facebook meterologists who are on iffy credibility at best.  Worrying about the weather is something I’ve done my whole life (honestly worrying in general comes natural to me.  I got it from my granddaddy).  One of my earliest memories was of a tornado outbreak that occurred when I was four or five.  I will never forget how hot it was that day or how black the clouds were.  I will never forget coming out of my house into a drenching driving rain into a yard that was flooded to my knees with hailstones floating on it (when it receded it cut a foot deep ditch in my yard).  I will never forget the fear in my mama’s voice as my daddy tried to get his truck up our dirt path, and the wind was blowing so hard he had the pedal to the metal and it was barely moving (he, of course, thought it was great fun).  I will never forget how scared I got for weeks after every time it clouded up and how she used to have to make me play outside (seriously, it was on my chore chart).  That experience instilled a great need in me to be prepared.  From then on I read every book in the Grantham school library about severe weather to learn all I could so next time I would know what to do.  I’ve also lived through Hurricane Fran where the wind was so strong it blew our front door open and soaked the entire living room and Hurricane Floyd where my uncles pond overflowed and crayfish crawled on Herring Road and we were without electricity for two weeks.  Still, all of my admittedly limited education and experience and first-hand knowledge were no preparation for a storm with a mind of it’s own. 

The back field where the corn maze would be after Hurricane Floyd, Sept. 1999

Where the sunflowers were last year after Hurricane Floyd, Sept. 1999.

That Saturday it rained, and rained, and rained.  I watched Facebook as people started to report water in their yards but it wasn’t until that afternoon that I realized what all this would mean.  Our biggest fear going into this was we’d miss a week of being open to deal with drying out.  We never thought we’d have the flood of the century, 19 years after the last flood of the century.  My husband is never one to stay put (especially after the lights go out).  He was riding around even at 3 or 4 that afternoon (like an idiot).  At 8 he went over to the farm.  He reported it was crazy wet, but relatively unscathed.  At 10 he went and called me with a tone of calm command.  He needed me to get ready to go out and help him, the water was up. It was still raining and the wind was blowing.  I got chilled to the bone as we rode over on the trusty Gator.  As soon as we crested the hill where the building sat I burst into tears and a chorus of "Oh My God’s".  The entire back half of the property was a rising river.  Under what is now the goat shelter we had lawnmowers and equipment parked.  We had an irrigation pump in our pond and a nurse tank slowly getting deeper in water from the swamp.  We pulled it all out with the trusty Gator.  Thank God he was antsy and decided to go check on things.  Then there was nothing to do but wait and see how high it would go (and play Skip Bo with The Boy). 

It went up about six more feet from where it was that night.  The corn was still standing.  We said a prayer and crossed our fingers when the water went down and the sun came out it would be alright. 

On Wednesday, the water began to recede.  Only then did we see the debris left behind.  Our corn maze that we’d spent countless hours planting and fertilizing and cutting out and mowing was now a hot mess.  Our neighbor had picked his corn and these huge masses and channels were now carved through our field and filled with tree branches, random trash, and two feet thick layers of corn stalks.  It didn’t matter that the corn was not blown down.  It had been mowed down by the river.  Well, now what could we do?  For two or three days I walked around in shock as we watched our community sink.  I wasn't prepared for this.  This wasn't supposed to happen.  As soon as we could stand up on the ground without miring completely we did and that first time we drove down there I cried.  This was our livelihood.  This is how we pay to keep our farm.  But, giving up isn’t something we do, so we made the best of it, took the corn maze off the schedule and cut the price, and I think in the end we pulled a decent season out of our hat.  We have the community to thank for it.  We didn't know how everyone would react with so many people having lost so much but everyone rallied.  You don't know how much we appreciated it.  We're just a little farm doing the best we can with what we have and you all make it worthwhile.

Now six months later it's easier to have better perspective.  If this is the worst that happens to us then we'll be lucky.  I can tell you this, it's going to take a few years before we plant a corn maze back there again.  We have healthy 'normal' children, each other, a dry house, and a beautiful farm to raise those kids on complete with the prettiest little river that once in a while turns into a huge destructive monster.  What more could we ask for?

Our farm path around 3 in the afternoon Hurricane Matthew came in.

The normal level of the Little River.

Our irrigation pond with the picnic area behind.

The entire back field and corn maze.

One of the channels made from the corn stalks.

Hello Again

I haven’t blogged in a really long time and I tell you, I’ve missed it.  I’ve had lots of stories but when I sit down to write I get stumped.  Maybe I’ve had writers block.  Well, all I can say is…I’m baaaack! (imagine me saying it in a sing-song voice and you’ll get the picture).

It’s spring break and we’re getting geared up for our CSA.  Yesterday we planted plants.  1000 bell pepper, broccoli, and pointed-head cabbage.  1000.  My legs are feeling it today.  I couldn’t get over the nostalgia as I did it though.  When I was little I used to stay with my grandparents when school was out.  My Uncle Pat raised tobacco back then and I remember being The Boy’s age and working in the greenhouse some during spring break wading through water an inch or two deep to help move trays of tobacco plants around so they could set them out (best job ever because I got to play in the water!).  Later, after I had a car, my sister and I helped with the setting out.  She was too young to be a super great setter, so her job was to wash the trays down with bleach.  My job was to walk behind the transplanter with a couple of plants and a peg and when the setters (my Aunt Patricia and Mrs. Brenda Scott) forgot one they’d holler to me that they missed and I’d plant that hole.  Sometimes when one of them would have something else to do I would take their place on the transplanter.  I liked that job way better for obvious reasons, until one of the last days we set.  It was cold and rainy and I sat on the back of that thing wrapped up in trash bags shaking with cold trying to set out with numb hands.  Even now I still say it was the coldest I’ve ever been.  We got a drink and a nab at 10 and 2, and an hour for lunch.  It was my first paying job and it was awesome…way better than taking it barns after the tobacco cured, which I also did, with much less success.  Hot weather and I have never gotten along well.

We didn’t ride on a transplanter yesterday.  The husband ran down the plastic with the water-wheel transplanter and punched holes in the plastic and once he went down a row he stopped and he and I and The Boy stuck plants by hand.  The Girl planted some too, because the plants were ‘so cute’ and needed homes.  But then she got distracted by lady bugs and asking constantly if she could go to grandma’s and would the ants sting her and a butterfly and picking strawberries.  Yes, we do have a few rows of strawberries.  No, unfortunately they’ll probably never produce enough for us to be open for picking.  We had to plant them so late because of The Flood that they didn’t get the root development they needed before they went into dormancy.  The way the weather was this winter (if you could call it that) didn’t help.  It was so up and down and then we had that horrible cold spell in March.  It’s turned into our personal strawberry patch, or The Girl’s strawberry buffet.  We wouldn’t have planted them at all but we didn’t plant the year before and while it was so nice to have the spring ‘off’, we missed having spring school tours.  We hoped we’d get enough to still do those and have some for the CSA, but it looks like that’s not going to happen so, Plan B.  Anyway, back to what I was talking about which was setting out plants.  While we were setting I kept thinking back to helping my Aunt and Uncle set out tobacco, and how great it was that my son was out there planting plants with us, and while we might not be taking some glamourous trip or something this spring break he was learning that hard work means something and if we work hard this spring and summer and fall maybe this winter we can take the glamourous trip.  Welcome to farm life.

I maintain that everyone ought to have to work a week on the farm.  If it does nothing else it will teach you the value of your education and an appreciation for those who choose to work with their hands (either because they have to or want too).  One of the best things it teaches is teamwork.  If we all work together towards a common goal there’s no telling what we can achieve. I can think of another place or two that concept might work…

Our poor strawberry plants.

She said "they taste like fruit punch."

The Boy is picky like me.  He said "they'd be good without the sesame seeds on them."  Bless his heart.

The sunset we were rewarded with as we prayed for rain.