Pine Stump Farm

Pine Stump Farm lies about half way up the eastern slope of the Okanagan River Valley, on one of the many benches left by the repeated catastrophic flooding from Lake Missoula...

Lake what? Isn't Missoula a city?

Well, you see, there were once glaciers all across this area...and one of them regularly blocked a river east of here...and it built up this lake, you see, Lake Missoula?...and every now and then the dam would break and many cubic miles of stuff would flood down the glaciated valleys where it would be deposited in vast flat cakes... Well, I guess you hadda be there.

Anyway, Carey and Albert have been here about eighteen years, raising alfalfa, goats, horses, trucks, catepillers, road graders...

Road what? Aren't they farmers?

You know, road graders, those things with the big wheels and the scraper underneath that they use to level roadways. Albert has done, and still occasionally does, mechanical work, like hauling 350 hp engines out of trucks or repairing the undercarriages of catepillers. Albert has quite a bit of equipment actually, like the excavator he traded 20 goats, a dog and $1500 for. Albert uses a lot of his equipment (the three tractors, two swathers, round baler, square baler, stake side trucks, semi...he's been collecting for a while, you see) to cultivate and harvest alfalfa hay in various fields around the valley.

Carey is not exclusively a farm girl either. She translates (spanish) for the county (jail), and runs a therputic horsemanship program.

Oh...yeah...farming. Carey and Albert have his and hers kitchen gardens. Cabbages and beets are a feature this year, along with the usual garlic, onions, tomatoes, squash, corn, purple potatoes...

Purple what?

Well, actually, they are much closer to the native Andean vegetable. Especially the ones Albert grows. And stop interrupting!

...and goats. Carey and Albert brought goats with them when they arrived at Pine Stump. They have Nubians, mostly, and Boers (for meat), and Sonnens. I like the Sonnens best, very gentle, and much less skitish than the Nubians. Carey is milking eight to ten does (that is a female goat, a doe, like the deer) this season. She sells fluid milk and makes farmstead cheese.

Goats can be pretty fun. And pretty frustrating. They are quite intellegent, and very curious, especially curious about ways to get through whatever fence might be keeping them from a particularly succulent weed. Sheep will watch you sidelong, keeping one eye on you while the other eye is looking out the other side, checking for more predators. Goats will look directly at you, with a slightly lidded look that seems to say "so, you're feeding me when?"

And then there's frisking. Lambs will frisk too, but by the time they are sheep they've pretty much given it up. Goats, on the other hand, never seem to get enough frisking. And their cries can sound remarkably human, especially when they've got their heads caught in the woven wire fence, "hey...heeeeyyyy...HEEEEYYYYYYY", which happens quite frequently...never enough weeds for a goat, and the grass (and weeds) are always greener on the other side...