Read Online Farmed and Dangerous by Edith Maxwell - Free Book Online Page B

offered thanks to both the subsidies and the grant she’d received that let her put all that free sunshine to good use.
    â€œStay here.” She pointed to the water. When he went over and lapped some up, she left, closing the door behind her. She had no idea if he would stay on the property if she let him roam around. He might go after the chickens or chase Preston again. She found a couple of old beach towels in the house and brought them back to the barn, favoring her bruised hip from the day before. Folding the towels into a bed, she set it near the water dish.
    â€œI have to work now.” She patted the towels. “Come and lie down. Dad will be by sometime to get you. He promised.”
    Dasha obliged. Then he laid his head on his paws and gazed up at her. Needy but compliant. She could live with that. She stroked his head a few times. “Good boy.”
    Shrugging off her parka, she checked the harvest list tacked to the wall by the desk. Pickup day didn’t fall until Saturday, but she needed to make sure she had enough to supply the twenty CSA customers, avid locavores, every one of them. This winter she’d gone down to an every-other-week pickup schedule, which took a little of the pressure off. The list for this two-week period included kale, beets, radishes, leeks, lettuce, Asian greens, and Swiss chard for crops she needed to cut or dig. She also had storage potatoes and various squashes to offer.
    The most urgent task for this morning was seeding more greens so she’d have a crop to harvest in March. Setting two seventy-two-cell flats on the tables beneath the grow lights, she filled the cells with the lightweight seed-starting soil mix and extracted a bag of hardy romaine lettuce seeds from a cupboard. She wished she’d invested in one of the new vacuum-seeding devices. The job would go much faster, and she wouldn’t waste as many of the minuscule germs of life. But the price was prohibitive for an operation of her scale, at least in the winter, when her income was lower.
    While she worked, trying to drop only one or two tiny lettuce seeds into each one-inch-diameter cell, she thought about Bev’s death. She realized she didn’t even know how Bev had died.
    â€œOscar wasn’t so happy with her. But kill a cranky resident?” Cam glanced at Dasha, who watched her every move. “I don’t think so.” She continued dropping seeds into the cells. “Frank didn’t seem that pleased with her, either. I wonder what that meant. What’s your opinion, Dasha?”
    He perked up, gave a little bark, then rested his head on his paws again. Preston rarely attended to what she said. Maybe there was something to this dog business, after all.
    â€œI need a dog translator.” Cam smiled at him before she returned her focus to her work. “Bev’s death will let Ginger get what she wants, I guess, if she inherits the property. That fertile farmland will turn into chemically treated lawns for McMansions. What a waste.”
    Dasha declined to comment. Cam finished her task. Most of the cells had gotten more than two seeds, which meant she’d be thinning and throwing away plantlets in a couple of weeks. She sprinkled a little more of the soil mix on top of each cell and then gently pressed it down with her fingers. The seeds were tiny and barely needed to be covered. She filled her watering can at the sink in the main area of the barn and gingerly watered each flat, glad she’d invested in a high-quality can that sprayed the water from a wide disk with tiny holes so the seeds didn’t get swamped. She lowered the rectangular light fixtures that hung from chains until they were suspended only a few inches above the flats and switched on the heating pads under them. The pads provided a low, steady warmth and let the seeds sprout sooner rather than later.
    She checked the clock above the desk, her stomach rumbling. The clock read 9:15 a.m.