Work on the farm has been good. I love planting stuff. The side benefit of getting dirt under my
fingernails cannot be overestimated, either.
We began last week cutting and sorting potatoes…we did that until we
were sick of it. Now we only have about
2 more tons of potatoes to cut.
Thankfully, we finished cutting and planting one variety and now we are
deep into another variety that is much easier to work with. After the first group was sprouting through
burlap sacks, THIS group—bigger, cleaner, tougher, more vigorous—is like a walk
in the park.
After the
potatoes, we put chopped straw mulch around garlic. The garlic was planted last fall and has come
up nicely—the mulch is designed to keep the weeds down and keep the moisture
in.
The day
after mulching the garlic and finishing the potatoes from hell, we began to
transplant some onions. We have several
hundred thousand onion plants from Texas (not hell) to put in the ground. We have a water wheel machine that is pulled
behind the tractor. There are four seats
behind the machine. In a perfect world,
people should be able to sit on these seats and punch onions in a row every 4
inches. At least on the first day, we
weren’t able to do this. The onions are
tiny and they stick together. Possibly a
different kind of vegetable that is more easily separated from their neighbors,
might be appropriate for this water wheel.
One thing
the wheel DOES do is mark where the plants should go with an indentation in the
soil and a dollop of water. So the
tractor drove down the field, marking the rows with water points. We walked along quickly poking the plants in and
surrounding them with soil. It worked
well. Six of us finished about .0005% of
160,000,000 onion plants—I exaggerate.
Please view the other posts to see some videos.
