It is 9:30 pm here in Oregon and I have just finished dinner and am ready to go to bed. I've been making it to bed by 10:00 pm every night, quite the early bird but when you wake up at 6:30 and work in the sun all day you get tired quickly. Over the weekend it was almost 90 degrees. When it gets that hot we take a break during the hottest part of the day (1:00-4:00) so we start work earlier and stay later. The break is nice, but getting motivated afterward can be difficult. We have been working on quite a few projects in the last few days. We potted soil and seeded (in the greenhouse) around 620 buttercup squash and 1200 cucumber. We are growing them for seed. Tim (the farmer I work for) has a contract with a seed company. They send him the initial seeds, we plant the seeds, then we harvest the plant and dry out the seeds and send in however many pounds of seeds that was established in the contract. So we planted the seeds yesterday, they will grow in the greenhouse for some time, then be transplanted to the fields, then picked and harvested for their seeds. This will take place from now in May until Nov.-Dec. Quite a long process. Last night we had a very nice dinner with the family (Tim, his wife and their two children age 8 and 5) and also with the very first couple to intern at the farm. They now own some acres just down the road. It was a great dinner. Tim grilled steak, hamburgers and lamb ribs over a campfire. We had pasta salad, broccoli and potatoes. We ate outside at some picnic tables, drank wine and beer and roasted marshmallows.

The chores with the animals are always ongoing. This year is the first time that Tim has raised hogs. They are pasture hogs, so what we do is section off a small portion of a pasture with hot wire that keeps the pigs contained. Then every few weeks we move the hot wire pen (usually within the same pasture, just a different section) and let them graze on fresh grass. It is a very efficient use of space. In the same pasture we can have pigs and also cultivate the ground for vegetables. Today we moved the big pigs pen, which was quite easy. They just follow anyone with a bucket of feed. However tomorrow we will be moving the little pigs, which can prove to be more challenging. I would suspect it will be circus like. We have 90 chicks that are growing very quickly. They are in a shed with access to a yard, but they are still too timid to wander in the yard. I saw 2 of them out there today. Tomorrow I am going to put the feed in the yard and see if we can coax them out. I think next week they will be ready to go out to pasture.

Today we learned about irrigation. Tim gets all the water on the property from the creek that runs straight through the property. About half of the pastures run on ditch irrigation (ditches in the ground where you can direct the flow of water by using gravity from the slope of the hills to water the land that is lower than the ditch) The other type of irrigation is with pipes. We learned how to put together the pipes and the junctions and lay them out in a pasture today.

This evening Colby and I went horseback riding. The horses have improved quite a bit since we last rode them. It has been an enjoyable way to explore the area and Sam has done very well them.

Sam is enjoying himself tremendously. Today he rolled in a fresh batch of poop. It was pretty gross. It seems as though we have to rinse him off every other day to get the poop off of him. I think it will be a never-ending battle. Sam has earned the name princess from Colby and I. He has done very well and I have been impressed with him, but compared to the other farm dogs he definitely is from the city. He is scared of almost all of the large livestock. All he wants to do is play with the other dogs on the farm. But unlike him, they have a job, so they are less then interested. However he is learning very quickly and I am sure enjoys all the room he has to run.

My address here is 176 Yale Creek Rd. Jacksonville, OR 97530

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