4 - 21 - 12: Morning Chores, Fauna Education, Weeding, and Poker

Today was supremely diverse. This morning, Emily, Devin, River, and I fed the pigs and cows and collected the chicken eggs. Then, Emily gave me a lesson in native plant identification as well as uses for common plants such as dandelions (apparently, dandelion leaves fetch quite a gold mine due to their inclination to become salad fodder.) She taught me about a specific kind of plant called the water hemlock, which looks like a leek or shallot with fronds connected to a tuber-like entity and which lurks in creeks (along with leeches). Like their landlocked cousins of a similar nomenclature, these aquatic plants are no friend to Socrates, nor any other living creature. Some of the non-croakage-inducing plants on the property include the stems of grasses in the yard, which I learned to pluck from their holdings in the ground and chomp on (as well as use to fashion myself a fancy set of walrus tusks).

After my daily fauna education, Emily, Devin, River, and I proceeded to play a fair dinkum game of poker to the vinyl tunes of ZZ Top (my host family has excellent musical preferences). And, this afternoon, I had the wonderful opportunity to meet Denise, Mimi's garden-savvy mother, and Pierre, Denise's husband and a friendly, feisty Frenchman with an affinity for rototillers. After Rob tractor terrorized the smithereens out of the garden with a harrow, he, Pierre, and I got to work weeding the garden. This summer, Mimi will be planting squash, Rob will be planting potatoes, and I will be planting kale, so I was happy as a clam in a cove to get my area of the garden started with weeding. So far, I have a square region (well, technically, a rectangular prism, since the dirt depth is incorporated in the kale growing region) ready for kale seeds.