I got up this morning and took inventory of my ailments: Hands throbbing, back ache, knees on fire, and more creaking and popping than a box full of bubble wrap. Yep, we’re farming again.
Stumbling out and turning on the coffee pot, I crack open one eye and find the boss already hard at work watering her houseplants and doing yoga. I dunno how she does it. She has the ability to open her eyes, hop out of bed and hit the ground running. Fran is the actual farmer. She’s been doing this all her life. I married into this. I can only hit the ground running in case of emergency. I gotta start slow and warm up to things, and don’t even get into my face before the first cup of coffee is finished, because it probably won’t end well.
In that twilight area before waking I start to go over in my head what we didn’t finish the day before, what we should do today and what is going to be a crisis if we don’t address it real soon. After my second cup of coffee I like to make a plan for the day with Fran so we’re on the same page. Typically it goes like this: Me: “Welp, we’d better finish planting this, weeding that, and go to the store and buy some more of that.” Boss: “Sure but first we do this that and the other thing.” Me: “Um, OK,” and off we go. Like I said, Fran is the farmer, and is usually right. You can’t hardly go wrong, it all has to get done.
Doubling down on last year’s onion surprise where I accidentally ordered way more onions than I thought, this year we’re planting a third more onions yet! They sold well, and we used them in almost everything we cooked, and even included them when I made my pickle batches. The bad news is that planting them is labor intensive. We have been called “old school” farmers recently and I suppose we are. You can find all kinds of videos of fancy planting machines that you pour the onion seedlings into one end of a shiny machine and it goes down the field plunking them in one by one in nice straight rows while the operator sits in an air conditioned cab reading a magazine. That’s not us. We till the ground, pound a stake in each end of the field and tie a string between the stakes. Fran hoes a shallow trench following the string (I’m really bad at it. I think she fired me from that job years ago), and we start planting. The onion seedlings are about as long as your finger and smaller in diameter than a pencil, and come in bundles of 50ish. At this point there is nothing to it but to grab two or three bundles of seedlings and with a sigh of resignation, sink to your knees and go for it. I’ll take a seedling out and stick my index finger into the soft trench dirt, push the seedling in the finger hole and then squeeze the dirt around it. It takes Fran and I all day to plant a box of seedlings and this year we have four boxes. We have one box left to plant. These kind of jobs are the ones I tend to daydream and write my best columns in my head, only to be brought back to reality when the boss observes that my seedling row has started to wander from the straight and narrow. Oops.
Pea patches No. 1 and No. 2 are planted — we stagger plant by a couple of weeks so the season is extended. That’s the theory anyway. Usually they catch up with each other, but we have to try. The potatoes are in, the strawberries are weeded, the lettuce is planted, snapdragons are planted, raspberries are weeded, dahlias and gladiolas will go in this week, and the greenhouse is bursting. I had to do a full stop barn cleaning today, as we use the barn floor as a kind of halfway house to harden the plants and flowers from the warm, humid greenhouse environment before they get to the windy cold outside. It’s an odd life. We go from nothing much is happening to light your hair on fire and run from dark to dark really fast, but we love it.
We have a bluebird family!! We love bluebirds. They make us happy. They also eat a lot of bugs. I tried to get them to come for 20 years. I would stubbornly make box after box trying to lure them in, but no luck. Finally I went to Walmart and bought a nest box for like $10 dollars and stuck it on a pole. Within two weeks we had a nice bluebird family move in. We have noticed that if Fran and I are out and around, somewhere there will be a bluebird watching us. I think they use us to stir up bugs for them. They are such good parents, it’s fun to watch the adults giving classes in bluebirding to the fledglings when they start out. It’s like having a bunch of blueish grey Woodstock’s from Charlie Brown flitting through our raspberry bushes. So, going on the premise that if one is good, then three is better I put up two more nest boxes. Bad move. We had tree swallows move in. They eat bugs, but aren’t nearly as pretty and tend to dive bomb our heads while we work. Always something.
Well gotta jump in bed, morning comes really quickly sometimes.
All the best,
Alan and Fran Greenrock Farm