Morning Song Farm News

As the crew arrived this morning to finish our Wednesday harvest and pack our CSA boxes for deliveries, more than one remarked that it doesn't feel like ordinary weather today. As in, "Hawaii without the ocean."   Unbelievably humid, the air is so heavy and still, the farm's normal tree-branch wind chimes have been silenced.    Farm cat leader, Samee, pictured above, has melted in the heat into his Not To Be Trespassed Spot. Such a friendly looking guy, surprisingly, he loses his stuff entirely if any other cat gets near the area in the farmhouse that he has carved out as His And Only His. Don't mistake that relaxed expression. He has no flexibility regarding his stated territorial rights. More than one guest here in our farmhouse has leaped out of bed, certain a cat was being eaten alive by a coyote, only to discover Samee expressing his displeasure at a fellow cat's unwelcome venture into his linened turf.

Okay, so no goats in the house. We're all on the same page with that. But a cat would be welcome. We've had a beautiful feral cat hanging around our packing house for a while, an inport from a local elementary school whose principal asked a member of our crew to take him to our farm as a "mouser." A few days ago he made his way up to our home, and invited himself inside. He either is a genius, or at some point in his life was an inside cat, because he immediately plopped himself down on my bed and fell asleep. He knows all about cat boxes, we've discovered, and hasn't stopped purring. He's been here for 3 days now, and the mouse in the house is gone. Since there's no dead mice pieces lying around, my guess is, his very presence is a deterent, the very best, pest management of all. At first he refused to venture outside, perhaps fearful that we'd not let him back in if he left. This morning was his first post-home invasion, outdoor excursion. He hu...