“I’ll never grow up,” Dante said. “I’m only as old as I feel, and right now I feel like a kid who wants to ride a tractor and do shit.”
“Not the mid to late forties surgeon?” Leah asked him.
“Oooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
“Ouch.”
“Burn…”
They chuckled and heckled each other a couple of minutes more, then broke off the meeting to go get cleaned up for supper.
On the floor, watching everything, Ranger and Roscoe waited patiently, hoping that their humans would roll out that big metal thing that cooked the meat they liked. When they saw that it was not going to happen, they too left to go search for something to eat.
Twenty-Eight
Kerry was nervous, but a lot of the work had been done ahead of time. Customers who had been used to coming to the market were given a printed 3x5 card, with instructions and directions. The time for the new market would be the same as the old one. Sherry, getting permission ahead of time, let the state police know what was going on and why. The officer who had taken Kerry out on a date just smiled, glad the idea was going to be tried.
The state police would provide between one and four people on the road to ‘control traffic’. They had their orders not to interfere with the USDA’s goons, but they also now knew the limit of the orders both from papers Sherry had given them from the farm, and from the agents themselves. Over a dozen incidents had seen both the cops and USDA enforcement arm at the same place at the same time. Each of them had been hair raising, a moment away from a gunfight between two law enforcement agencies and the farmers, with the agency being the common agitator.
The governor apparently had found himself between a rock and a hard place. He was suddenly more powerful than he had been before with the emergency powers enabled, but he was also sympathetic to the plights of his people. He did not have the full story of the horrors to come, but in the heat of the moment he thought he was doing what was best, and the state police answered to him.
“Password?” Rob asked in full kit.
“Rob, you snot nosed little crotch sniffing son of a—”
“Just kidding, Aunt Kerry,” he said, manually pulling the gate back a foot, then locking it in place.
“Not going to let me park in there?” she asked, an eyebrow raised.
“No ma’am. Security protocol. Never know when somebody could slip something on your car, or if you were under duress and had a trunk full of men in black. Then I’d have to blow up your car and quite possibly you too.”
“I’ll walk,” she said, understanding his dry sense of humor.
Rob, Anna, Angelica, and Dante were there dressed up as security. Which in their case meant they were in their medium loadout. Black tactical vests, extra magazines. Pistols worn on the outside and rifles across their chests. The ladies had, even though it was cold, elected to wear sleeveless shirts under their vest. Rob had remarked they looked like supermodels of the apocalypse genre and had gotten smacked by Angelica for it playfully.
“Good, but can I see your membership card?”
“Oh for the love of all that’s holy, you little—”
“You’re all set, Kerry,” Angelica piped up. “Rob’s just nervous and he picks on people when he’s like that.”
“He doesn’t pick on you,” Kerry said, looking at her.
“That’s because she’d kick my ass,” Rob said pointing at her.
“You’re damned right I would. I’d monkey stomp your skull so hard, if I had a dick, I’d be able to skull fuck you.”
“Oh my gosh,” Anna said, starting to giggle.
“Sorry, I’ve been working on my tough girl talk. Did it work?”
“I think I peed a little,” Kerry admitted. “Now, all these names have gone through three of the four of us. LeBaron thought it was a silly idea, but he said he is going to come out here and see it for himself. He didn’t believe that the government has been seizing food from people.”
“Well, it’s certainly a good day for this,” Dante said, trying to change the subject. “When are folks going to start showing up?”
“Vendors, any minute now. Customers, in another half an hour.”
“Ok, good. They know how this is going to go down?” Dante asked.
“Yes, as long as they are not paying for a space here, they’re not doing business with you, which hopefully from what I’ve been told, keeps you out of trouble. You’re just letting them put some tables and stuff up on your lawn… Oh look, the cops are here,” she said brightly.
She waved as several state police cruisers pulled over on the side of the road.
“Are they coming in?” Angelica asked.
“I don’t know, but they’re welcome to, I made sure to tell them.”
“Good deal,” Dante said, “we want them on our side.”
“Those guns might make them nervous though,” Kerry said, then saw that Rob and Anna were carrying identical AR10s.
“Especially you two. Are those monster hunting machine guns?” she asked.
“No,” Rob said with a chuckle, “but I like ‘em.”
“He’s still pissed the cops took his last one,” Dante said. “Cried about it until Anna there built him another one.”
“You’re going to be in trouble. Does your wife let you out of the house without a chaperone?” Kerry asked him.
“Hey, here comes a line of cars…”
Curt marveled at all that Luis and the Garcia brothers had gotten done in a couple of days. One greenhouse was completely built, and the second one had all of the bones there, it just needed the plastic stretched over it, but they’d decided to wait on that until they saw how good the test run was going to go.
There were nearly one hundred buckets lined up on the floor of the greenhouse, with PVC pipe running through the bottom of each. That was just the drainage. Then there were black plastic irrigation lines run down the middle of a pair of twenty-five bucket rows, then repeated. From there, were smaller irrigation lines that fed directly into the buckets, one and two lines or nozzles per bucket. The theory was very simple, and most of the system ran without complex electronics.
Luis had constructed a small ten-foot-tall water tower outside the greenhouse and a garden hose ran to the first bucket. In that first bucket was a float valve. When the system was running, the float valve would stop water from coming into the main system, without flooding it if too much water came in at the same time. Once the valve floated up on that first bucket, which drained into the other 99 buckets, it would stop receiving water. At the end of the run were two drains. PVC pipes and fittings that drained from the greenhouse, back down the hill to the catfish pond.
“I don’t get it all though,” Curt told Luis.
“It’s not that hard when you break it down into systems. You have the drain system, the irrigation system, and the water pumping system. Other than that, it’s just growing plants.”
“Ok, so how about the water? How do you know how much to run up the hill from the pond?”
“See these three IBC totes, with drains down to the pond?”
“Yes,” Curt said.
“The top one can drain into the one below it and so on if we need it to… But the idea is, we pump out of the pond to the reaches of the pump's lift height into another container. Then it is pumped up again. Then again, until it reaches the water tower.”
“Couldn’t you just pump from the bottom all the way up though?” Curt asked. “More moving parts, more chances of something breaking.”
“I thought so too, until I saw how much power a pump of that size would cost. These pumps I am using? They are like fifty dollars a piece. No super high-pressure stuff here.”
“Ok, but why the totes? Won’t that settle out some of the nutrients we want to get to the plants?” Curt asked.
“Si, but that is not a bad thing, you see, we can open the bottom valve on the totes and collect that nutrient water. We can get a pretty good reading of its PH and Par
ts Per Million sediment and make a good guess on how much nitrogen and other nutrients are in there.”
“Ok so what’s to stop it from working on a cloudy day? Or at night?” Curt asked, “Or one pump quits working?”
“We have overflow drains at the top of each IBC, that hooks into the main drain down to the water, with a solenoid and small solar setup near the drain on the west end of the greenhouse. If there’s low light, the solenoid closes, and the draining will not happen from the greenhouse down. That way the roots of the plants still have water in them, and they won’t dry out at night, or when the sun isn’t shining enough to run the pumps.”
Curt thought about that a moment and then nodded. The system was extremely simple when you thought about it as four modules. The greenhouse, the venting, and the care of the pond full of fish was more than the four modules when you added those in, but they basically ran themselves.
“This is amazing,” Curt said walking inside, “I mean, I’ve been out here everyday, but I’ve not seen plants grow this fast before. It’s been planted, what two weeks?”
“Two weeks and a couple of days. More or less,” Luis agreed.
“And some of it looks almost ready to harvest,” Curt pointed out.
“Yes, some of this loose-leaf lettuce is a three week turn around for the first cutting. I just put some seeds in these little plugs here, and the constant water running over them gets them to grow. The roots have to reach for the water at night and we don’t have to worry about rot that way from it being too wet before they sprout. It’s the best system I could come up with.”
“It’s really kind of amazing,” Curt said, “and when you’re done cutting the lettuce, you just put another plug in where you tore the old one out?”
“You can do that for a time, but eventually you’re going to want to pull the whole basket lid off and clean the old roots out, or you’ll get rotting roots in the bucket, and all we want in there is water.”
“Wow, ok,” Curt was fascinated, “and I’m sure you have a system down for that you could teach me, Andrea and whoever else?”
“Most definitely. In the hot months, we may have to roll up one side of the greenhouse or uncover it entirely though.”
“That won’t be a problem. Do we have enough of everything for this setup, to like, run forever?”
“The root riot plugs I don’t have so many of, but they are cheap and easy to get. The rest of the stuff, the pumps and solar panels, I have replacements for, and I got a big order of seeds that should last me a couple of years if kept where it’s cooler.”
“Luis,” Curt said, his voice hitching, “with as much as we’ve done on the farm here to get ready, most of it was about how to stockpile or make what we’ve needed. The farming part we are noobs on, and I know we have literal tons of feed and animals here… what we didn’t have was a way to fill in the gaps. I mean, we are all sort of shit at gardening. The one Goldie put in, plus our horrible one are mediocre tries at best… what you did, was like… art.”
“Please don’t kiss me. I am not like that,” Luis said suddenly, making Curt look up at him sharply.
“Ok, maybe one kiss, right here,” Luis leaned forward, duck faced.
“I’ll tell Goldie you propositioned me,” Curt shot back.
“And she’ll whack you with a spoon for lying to her!” Luis said with a smirk.
“You’re right… but that whole bro love fest stuff was my way of saying thank you. And I personally want you to know that I would love it if you stuck around here as long as you want.”
“Thank you,” Luis said. “I didn’t get the impression you guys were in a rush to fill the fourth cabin.”
“In my opinion, we have,” he said, “but that has to go up for a group vote. I want to go help Andrea with something, then we are going up to the market and see how it goes. Are you wanting to come?”
“Yes, I think Goldie is going to borrow the second UTV and have me ride up with her.”
“Or you could both take one,” Curt grinned. See you up there, I have to run!”
“The others think you should wait another month,” Curt told Andrea who had her little disk out, putting it in the chuck so she could cut the cast off her leg.
“I don’t care. I have handled breaks and fractures for a long time myself. I am ready. I may wait on my arm a little bit longer, but I want my legs free.”
“I do too,” Curt said with a grin.
“Perv. Help me cut this off and then help me stand. I do not want to put full pressure on it all at once. If it’s too bad, I’ll have Leah re-cast me.”
“Ok,” Curt said, and got to work.
Dante was surprised at how smoothly things started out. The vendors showed up and got set up. Some brought tables, some brought canopy tents to keep them out of the sun. Many of them had cash boxes, but the bib middle pocket was what a lot of them were doing. They were relaxed. A few griped about having to cart or carry stuff from the road when they could have driven through the gate.
Kerry had a checklist and was checking names vs. IDs on people she did not know. Every person was given a membership packet which they paid five dollars for, and a dollar upon entry for members ‘dues’. It was a loophole around what they had been told.
“Everything looks good,” Dante said, bouncing on his feet, shaking his hands out. He had been feeling restless and was letting out nervous energy.
The fact he had a rifle bouncing across his chest did not go unnoticed, but with it being Arkansas, it wasn’t that unusual to see somebody carrying a scary black gun on a farm.
“So far, I’m glad,” Anna told him. “Steven texted me a few minutes ago. He got an offer to bid on a house about an hour from here. He’s getting the details together, then he’s going to come up and join us.”
“More the merrier,” Rob said, moving towards the front where Kerry was letting people in and out.
“Thank you, Mrs. Thomas,” Kerry said, putting the dollar bill on the card table she was standing next to at the gate.
“Any problems?” Rob asked her.
“Not yet, but stick around for a few.”
“Ok,” he said. “Angel, front gate please.”
Angelica had been wandering in the crowd. She was so short, even though she was wearing tactical gear, she did not stick out to others who weren’t right in front of her. Rob did, so he was the big and obvious one. If he was calling her…
“Be right there. Do you need me to be naughty or nice?”
“I love it when a girl talks dirty,” Dante remarked, all of them wearing their radios and voice activated microphones with men in black certified earwigs.
“Dunno. Aunt Kerry asked me to stick close. She’s eyeballing a guy.”
“He’s not on my list, that’s for sure,” she said simply.
“Then I guess he’s not on the list,” Rob said.
“Ok,” Angelica said from behind him, “I’m right here.”
They waited and received a ton of thanks for opening up a market where people could buy produce. Until the stores emptied, people had not realized how much they relied on market days until the market days did not happen any more.
“The hell is Ed Buckley doing here?” Rob asked.
“Anna, to the front gate please,” Angel said sweetly.
“I heard, I’m almost there,” her voice was chuckling over the radio.
Twenty-Nine
“Ed, how’s it going?” Kerry asked him.
“Pretty good ma’am. I was wondering if I could come in?”
“Sorry, this is a member’s only event,” she said, “but if you’d like to apply, I can fast track the paperwork.”
“Members only? How much does membership cost?” he asked.
“Five dollars, and a dollar in dues every market visit.”
“That’s… ok,” Ed said, pulling out a wallet and putting six dollars down on the table.
“I’m sorry, I can’t take this,” Kerry said, pulling a stapled stack o
f papers out and handing it to him. “Get these back to me by this Thursday and I’ll have a yea or nay vote on your membership.”
“What?” Buckley asked.
“You don’t just automatically get to join,” Kerry said.
“But I heard there’s food here, and it’s a public event. I’m even here in uniform as an officer of the law.”
“Sorry bub, it’s private property. Since you did not get an invite, how about you take a hike unless we need you?” Rob asked.
Ed snarled and several people behind him backed up as he clenched and unclenched his fists.
“Hey puddles,” Anna said, stepping up next to Rob. “Remember me? Remember how you’re forever my bitch?”
“Watch your mouth,” Buckley hissed, spittle flying from his lips.
“Sorry, but if you look, there’s about a thousand cameras out here. Ok, maybe not a thousand but all of us are wearing GoPros, and we have a video surveillance system that only… oh yeah, you would know how good it is. So, don’t do anything illegal and force us to remove you from private property. How’s that?”
“Is there a problem here?” a state trooper asked, walking up.
“These yokels think they can keep me out of this market,” Ed said, spitting on the ground.
“Well as long as you’re a member in good standing and paid your dues, you should be able to shop, am I right Kerry?”
“You got it sugar,” she said, dropping him a salacious wink.
Rob started chuckling as he realized this was the trooper that had taken his aunt out. They weren’t dating, but that was by a degree so fine that Rob didn’t even care to distinguish the differences.
“But they won’t let me in now, even after I tried paying.”
“I mean, they are allowed to vet their own membership. That way they can keep out any riffraff, thieves or… assholes.”
The last was deliberate, and Ed turned to the new officer, his hand already dropping to his side. As far as tells went, Rob now knew Ed’s. When he felt threatened, only then did his body language drop into that obvious display of fight or flight. He could be pissed all he wanted, but he never dropped his hand near his gun until he felt like there was a threat. Rob noted that for later and to share with the others afterwards.
Behind The Curve-The Farm | Book 2 | The Farm Page 18