Up front, the two tractors: the May Olive Eggers — our dragon-egg hatchlings — and the seven-week kits, both putting on size and getting moved across fresh grass. Out on the mulch mound, the ducks have claimed their spot and are running it like they pay rent. Back along the fence, the mature layers are doing what mature layers do — quietly out-earning everybody.

If you stood at the edge of my garden this week, the first thing you'd notice isn't the zucchini or the basil or the dill going feathery in the morning sun. It's the black. Long runs of landscape fabric stretched down every bed, plants poking up through neat little slits like they were placed by someone who has their life together.

In a meat-rabbit program, you don't need many bucks. Keeping every male you raise just to feel kind isn't actually kindness — it's a slow drain on space, feed, and the quality of your herd. The cleaner, more respectful path is to decide early: cull the surplus bucks young, keep the doe kits to grow out and evaluate for breeding, and use what you cull to feed the working animals that earn their keep. Around here, that's the dogs. We opt to use a system called the Buck Bop.

Yesterday, we're standing around in the field waiting on the farrier, the way you do, and Morgan, on a whim— who is whimmy in the truest sense of the word, the kind of person who does the thing the second the thing occurs to her — just hops up on Cassie bareback. No saddle. No plan. Twenty-nine-year-old horse, three years off, halter and lead and a rider going purely on muscle memory.