Geez, I’m such a bad blogger! But the internet has been down at the farm in Arlee, and the days have really been pretty packed. It’s nice waking up at 7 and going to bed at 9:30 or 10 – it makes the days feel as long as they are, since it’s still light when I go to bed most of the time.
Arlee is a farming town about 30 minutes outside of Missoula. It’s a beautiful place – farmland everywhere, surrounded by snow-topped mountains in all directions. The town itself is probably the smallest town I’ve ever been in. There are probably 10 or so stores, all small, and no hardware store or drug store or anything like that. It’s located on Indian Reservation land, which is great. It’s the Flathead Indian Reservation. I can’t say much about that except that I LOVE how the Native Americans treat wildlife. There is a lot of construction going on near Arlee right now, and as a part of that they build big tunnels under all the roads for wildlife to go through, so they don’t have to cross the roads! Amazing.
So much has happened, it’s hard to document it all. But I’m staying with a couple and their 9-year-old son, Mason. Kathee and Dave are such amazing people, and really dedicated organic farmers in an area where that is certainly the minority. Kathee and I have planted a handful of things – tomatoes, basil, broccoli, corn, sunflowers and gladiolas. I’ve been building a fence for the pea plants that were already coming up when I got here (and now the big project is weeding those beds, which are already overrun with quack grass and various other pests).
Every morning I help Dave move the irrigation pipes. This is hard work! They are about 30-foot pipes that are quite heavy, and you have to latch each pipe to the previous one while the water is gushing out of it. They do it this way so that each pipe’s latch gets firmly held by the pressure of the water. The first day I did this, I cut up my hands all over and bashed my right thumb between two pipes (you have to get a lot of momentum to get the pipes to latch, so getting a finger caught in there is pretty painful). But those have pretty much healed by now, along with the huge scratch on my upper arm from barbed wire. Yay.
The farm also has a small flock of sheep, laying and meat chickens and a 30-year-old donkey named Daisy. Needless to say, the sounds at the farm are always entertaining.
This weekend Dave was nice enough to invite me to a house on an island (off of a nearby lake) that their friends own. It was at Flathead Lake, which is an amazingly beautiful place! The photo link at the bottom will show some of those. It was a fantastic group of people – most of whom met by working at a co-op together in Missoula in the 70s. We camped out on the island and enjoyed ourselves relaxing, reading, kayaking and painting rocks. It was pretty serene, and I’m grateful that they included me!
I should get back to the house now and do some watering. Sorry for the short update, I’ll try to do a longer one soon. I have so many stories.
