by: Rick Minter
It would be fun to say my “Postcards from the Po’ Farm” blog is back due to popular demand. The truth is I just decided to start back writing it.
A beautiful full moon was rising Wednesday night as Joanne and I called it a day after working in the Christmas trees and the sales barn. It was the biggest supermoon of the year. The November full moon is known as the Beaver Moon, since it occurs when beavers are preparing for winter. It’s also known as the Frost Moon, as it coincides with the time the first frost of the season is approaching.
In previous years, when I had a full-time newspaper job, I have trimmed Christmas trees late into the night during the full moon. You could see well enough to do a decent job with the SAJE trimmer, which features an eight-foot hedge trimmer bar powered by a weed eater engine with the whole contraption connected to the operator by a backpack.
(pictured: Rick and Steph after trimming 1800 trees ina week a few years back).
The scary part of trimming by moonlight is when you discover something like a key bolt has loosened and you never saw it in the dark.
I haven’t done any moonlight trimming in years, but I did finish spraying some fire ant spray the other night with the help of the little lights on the front of the zero-turn mower that we use to pull the sprayer.
Since the late 1980s, we’ve spent every October and November in a mad scramble to get our farm and our trees in shape for the season. (Some might argue that we fall short on both, but we get few complaints as most folks seem to enjoy seeing our “junk.”)
We usually get to see sandhill cranes migrating south in their familiar V formations, but we haven’t seen any so far this year. We have seen plenty of evidence of the presence of armadillos as there is freshly disturbed ground every morning. And the deer are on the move, with bucks using their antlers to destroy trees on a nightly basis.
Our mid-afternoon snack breaks have become time-consuming affairs due to the traffic we encounter on Highway 92 as we make our way to the convenience store in Woolsey.
It makes me long for the time awhen we had a store in Inman, where we’d buy a noon meal consisting of fat slice or two of bologna, cut to order at the store, and some hoop cheese, sliced on site as well. (You did have to peel the red ring off the bologna before eating it.)
That bologna and cheese, eaten with crackers and washed down with a cold Diet Coke, wasn’t the healthiest of meals but it would give you a much-needed boost of energy.
Now for lunch we eat leftovers, or a can of tuna with a boiled egg, and look at our phones or laptops til time to go back to work.
Rick