Summer soon, please?

The lazy fucking farmer is writing with fingerless mittens on, drinking rooibos tea, listening to the eminent Brenda Fassie and dreaming of African sunshine.

The lawn

The lazy fucking farmer really can't be arsed to cut the lawn. That should go without saying really. Of all the things to spend time and energy on, mowing the lawn is so far down on the list it drops right off it. If I had to mow the lawn, I wouldn't have a lawn.

Truth to be told, I'm slowly increasing the area used for vegetables at the cost of lawn area. Carrots taste better than grass, so I think this a logical step. On the other hand, one need some places around the house to just trample around on. If everything was garden, getting from A to B would quickly be some kind of crazed combination of slalom and hurdle.

The lazy fucking farmer is stuck with at least some lawn.

Happily we have a horse. A horse is superior to a lawnmower in many ways:

1. Grass gets magically transformed to horsepower and fertilizer.
2. I do not need to buy fuel, as the grass itself fuels the horse.
3. Hence I don't use gasoline and thereby reduce my carbon footprint (although I suppose the smug levels I might have gained by this are mostly eaten up by the diesel required to keep the old pick-up truck going).
4. Operating a lawnmower requires work. First I'd have to earn money to buy it, then I'd have to walk around behind it and when it breaks down I'd have to pay someone to fix it. Arguably maintaining a horse also requires work, but they smell better.
5. You can convince a horse to give you a nice massage. A massage by lawnmower would likely be the end of you.
6. Having a lawnmower requires time. Okai, so does a horse. This point is totally invalid when I think about it.
7. Time spent with a horse is incredibly much more rewarding than time spent with a lawnmower. Being with a horse might even heal mental illness. Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy may be contested, but Lawnmower-Assisted Psychotheraphy doesn't even exist. 
8. You know the annoying grass that grows in nooks and crannys that you just can't reach with the lawnmower? A horse can.
9. When I lie in my bed munching apples (an activity very high on the list of what I like to spend time doing) I can just shout for the horse and throw the apple cores out the window instead of taking them to the compost.
10. A horse will often greet you with a whicker. If a lawnmower greets you at all it is with infernal noise.
11. Horses simply have a lot more uses than a lawnmower. Getting shitfaced on ale and mead, dressing up like a viking and riding a horse about actually feels rather epic. Getting shitfaced on ale and mead, dressing up like a viking and riding a landmower just isn't the same. To illustrate: 

The most epic google result of "viking on a horse"

The most epic google result of "viking on a landmower"

Okai, the posture of the guy with the lawnmower is pretty epic. It could have been Túrin Turambar right before he decide to fall on his sword (grass can do that to you. I spent a summer working in the park department in Hafnarfjordur, Iceland -a place with too much grass and too few trees, and the feeling of defeat when you realize that grass grows back and you have to cut it all over again is excruciating). But the presence of the lawnmover is totally ruining the mood of an otherwise great picture. Which kind of proves my point. Also, it should be taken into consideration that while the other pictures of vikings and horses were almost all epic, the people with landmowers just looked like twerps. Admittedly, they also looked like they were pretty high on something (possibly on the mixture of fresh cut grass and exhaust fumes); but it's a pleasure I find myself quite willing to forgo. I bet it doesn't taste half as good as ale anyway.

The only instance I can think of when a lawnmower will be more useful than a horse is in a zombie apocalypse. After all, I've seen Braindead. But while zombie apocalypse is something we all prepare for, just in case, how likely is it really to happen? And even if it did, I'd rather pick up a chainsaw or a shotgun than a lawnmower anyway.

So having concluded that horses totally pwns lawnmowers, how do you mow your lawn using a horse?
It is quite simple really:

1. Fence off everything you don't want the horse to eat.
2. Let the horse loose.

This might of course not work if you live in a place without sufficient distance between you and the neighbours. If so, the lazy fucking farmer recommend that you start looking for a new and better home.
If that is not an option, perhaps a herd of well trained rabbits is something to look into?

Horses only munch on the lawn of course.
They never start on the berrybushes.
Ever.

Sometimes I hate it here

Last spring, all my squash and cucumber plants froze to death. A few other things died too. Despite living a protected life in a greenhouse. So this year I took steps to give the poor sensitive things some more protection, adding a thermostat oven to the greenhouse. Despite this, Jack Frost have crept in and offed my most promising darlings. Some of them might survive, but others look like they have definitively moved on (I do not really know where plants go when they die, apart from the compost, or even if plants have souls. That would possibly be worth a post in itself. But I strongly feel that having struggled on in a harsh environment from an early age my brave squash plants had deserved better than this. A plant heaven of everlasting summer, reincarnation down south in more gentle climates or somesuch). They had itty bitty flowerbuds on them and everything *sob*.

Also, I have been pondering where to put all the tomato plants I have, making odd plans like for example portable tripod mini-greenhouses from old fenceposts. As of this morning, finding space for tomato plants is not something I have to worry about any more.

It's a really annoying dilemma. If I sow too early the plants get too big for the living room, I move them out in the greenhouse and they die. If I sow later they survive the spring, but they don't get ripe before the autumn frost kills them. There are occasional nights when the temperature creeps under zero until midsummer, and winter (i.e. snow) is usually here in October.

Being an organic farmer (I went to organic agriculture school and everything) I'm supposed to work with nature, but..
THE LAZY FUCKING FARMER IS NOT CONTENT WITH ONLY EATING POTATOES!
I want some variation in my diet! I want to gorge myself on melons and pears, but I accept that it is near impossible in this frozen mountain hole. A little tomatoes and cucumbers though, perhaps a hardy little apple tree? Is that really too much to ask?

Fuck you nature, this is war. Next year I'm moving the greenhouse to a more secluded part of the farm and putting in a bigger oven.

20 bottles of mead

Twenty bottles of mead on the workbench. The mead initially turned out extremely dry, so I added a little bit lot more honey. Now it is perhaps too sweet. I have a sneaking suspicion that drinking too much of this stuff might make one ill.

On the bright side, I measured it to 14%  and it taste like honey and liquid sunshine.

Some spruce was also added, but no matter how much I sample this, I can not detect any hint of it anymore. Odd. I wonder where the spruce flavour went? Perhaps if I keep drinking I will find it....