“It” happens

Trumpet vines: All plant life wants to survive. Some plants are tender and easily succumb. Then there are those that refuse to give up, never content with their one little corner of this world. They spend their days busily burying roots, parachuting fluttering seed helicopters, spitting out runners, throughout the landscape. The thick-trunked trumpet vine that covers our pergola and delights us come late summer with showy orange flowers is one of these. Its knotted roots have invaded our nearby asparagus bed, the red leafy sprigs shooting up among the spears, indicating a subterranean assault. Yesterday evening we spent an hour excising the vining roots from the heavily producing bed. We were not completely successful. We settled in the end for hacking off the main invasive root and plucking from the soil the numerous light-seeking tendrils. Yet it still lurks beneath the surface, biding its time, waiting for its next attack.

The new kid in town: Being a worthy farmhand requires not only an ability to work hard but also common sense, good observational skills, respect for tools, capacity for listening and working independently, and basic knowledge of equipment.

Most of our farm helpers have long since grown to manhood. One is in the Navy, and another is an electrician; others, like the “Oh, good Lord” kid, have simply disappeared into the background of the valley. Each, though, has played a part in building this farm. Since the last kid, two years back, decided he would rather play football than work under my tutelage, we have needed a new assistant. Hearing that a nearby farmer who raises pigs had a son at loose ends, we pounced and lined him up for a trial run yesterday.

At 13 going on 14 and already a strapping 5’8”, the newbie first helped me tackle pulling up a few hundred yards of electric fence. The two of us then carried the poles and spools of wire up our sloping hill pasture and reconfigured a new paddock for the ram and ram lambs. This introductory task was set up as a stamina challenge: trudging up and down the hill, putting in the step-in posts, stringing wire along the way. This kid performed all required with minimal instruction — did not even mind running down to the barn, finding a new spool of wire, then running back up the hill. (Ah, the exuberance of youth!)

For the next task, I put him to work for an hour with the weedeater, giving him a complicated series of directions of what needed attention. This kid did not miss a beat. He nailed everything I instructed, even put the equipment and gas can up without being asked. We then spent another hour cleaning out the winter bedding from the barn. Barn cleaning is a dirty and dusty job, one in which the assistant has to wield a big rake to pull hay and manure into the tractor bucket, helping me make sure each load is full before I back out and add the load to the growing manure pile in the outer corral.

When we were finished for the morning, this kid put up his tools, again, on his own, while we waited for his mom to drive over and pick him up. With a few minutes to kill, we then walked out to the gardens … where he took one glance at the rows in the hoop-house and offhandedly ID’d cabbage, broccoli, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, and watermelon.

“Louis,” I thought, “this is the start of a beautiful partnership.”