What's it like on the farm?

            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.