I’ve spent the last five years learning about farming. At first I couldn’t even tell the difference between a hay field and an oat field. Now I can tell when a planting is late. I have learned enough about cattle to sort them for breeding. I don’t do as good a job as the Farmer of course, but I won’t miss any that are really bad. I have learned how to milk a goat, even though I’m terrible at it.

Now it’s spring, and the farm is incredible. There are baby animals everywhere.

The farmer is letting the piglets slip out of their pen. The piglets run all over the farm like they’re free-range chickens, and because the mom is stuck in the pen, the piglets always come back. Read more

We have a huge vegetable garden. While the Farmer was planting huge crops of corn and hay, I was planting twenty types of vegetables. I have not bought vegetables from the store since May, when the first lettuce was ripe.

This is a picture of me digging through our forty tomato plants.

When I was putting them in the ground, I never dreamed that forty would really grow. In the northern suburbs of Chicago, where I grew up, the vegetables we planted never came up. So I sort of planned for that. But instead, I have an incredible supply of tomatoes.

When I can find them. Because I didn’t stake the tomatoes. So every couple of days, I go out and hunt for them, in what has become a thick brush of tomato stems. Read more