For anyone waiting with baited breath (as we were), everything has gone well so far with inspections on the farm-to-be. The soil tests came back showing everything well within normal ranges. We still have to wait for the current owner to get the well tested, but as the home has been lived in consistently, that will hopefully not present any problems. If everything continues to move forward as expected, we plan to be making our move to West Virginia by early July.
One of the sad parts of making this big step forward is that we have to sell our current home and therefore our current wonderful garden. Our real estate agent recommended we take down the garden before putting our house on the market, but with the garden chock full of kale, cabbage, onions, and garlic, I couldn’t bring myself to dismantle the entire thing. Instead, we just decreased in size a little. The garlic in particular was something I was not even going to consider removing. As you may know, garlic is planted each year not from seed, but by putting the actual cloves of garlic (the same ones you cook with) into the ground in the fall. These then sprout and grow leaves and eventually develop into an entire head of garlic by the next summer.
The variety of garlic that is currently growing in our garden is one that I have been saving from year to year and carrying with me from farm to farm for the past 6 years. It is an amazing variety, producing consistently large heads with beautiful purple striping on the skin and a wonderfully spicy flavor. We are planning to save all of this year’s crop to use as seed for next year’s garlic on our farm, so there is no chance that I was going to rip that out before it was ready to harvest! This also explains our late June/early July moving date- garlic is usually not ready to harvest until that time of year, so we’re not moving until it’s ready to move with us! Otherwise, we’re harvesting spring’s usual bounty of greens and enjoying bringing in food from the garden again. The kale seems to grow by leaps every day and now that we’re past our final frost date, I was able to plant some tomatoes and zucchini plants. We may be able to harvest some zucchini before our big move, but the tomatoes will likely be for the new owners’ enjoyment.
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