09:35 – We ran errands locally yesterday afternoon. Among those was opening a corporate bank account. In Winston, we had both our personal and corporate accounts at the Allegacy Credit Union. When we moved up here, we closed out the personal account in Winston and opened a new account at the credit union up here. Unfortunately, they don’t do corporate accounts, so we had to go to one of the local banks for that. Now I just have to get the new account set up in PayPal so that I can transfer money from PayPal to the new account.
Donna Edwards, the lady who took care of setting up our account, mentioned that she and her husband own a farm. Barbara asked what they raised, and she replied (of course), beef cattle. She said they kept a small herd of about 60. When Barbara mentioned that our property backs up on Judge Doughton’s land, she said that he ran cattle on a much larger scale, several hundred of them. It seems like every third or fourth person we meet up here has a cattle farm, including Lori, our USPS carrier, and one of the women that Barbara met with the Friends of the Library Group. Donna also mentioned that in the last 10 or 15 years the number of dairy farms in the area had fallen from about 150 to a dozen or so. Apparently, it’s more profitable to raise beef cattle.
Barbara is out doing yard work this morning, creating and mulching flower beds around the house. We also plan to put in a small garden for herbs and vegetables, maybe a 10×20 foot plot at the side of the house. Barbara is going to ask Al if he’d mind bringing up his rototiller on their next visit. We’ll also install a fence to keep the deer, rabbits, and other predators out of the garden. Barbara seems to think that chicken wire won’t be enough to stop them, so we’ll probably go with a four or five foot chain-link fence. We’ll grow most of the herbs in pots because some of them can be incredibly invasive, but I do want a small patch where we can grow vegetables, mainly for seed-saving.
USPS just showed up with the bulk of my Walmart order. As I expected, they shipped one jar of the beef bouillon rather than the 12-pack they claimed to be sending me, but one jar for $2.98 was reasonable, whereas 12 jars would not have been.