Two Feet in the Dirt

Even as the weather gets chillier, the work hasn’t slowed down. And each job finished seems to create a new job after it, whether we were expecting it or not. The most intense so far has been all about the rocks. Unless you’re farming in the great plains (and for all I know, even there), your soil is likely to have some stones. However, this is less likely in land that has been farmed for years and years as some other poor sucker has probably already pulled them out by one means or another. After talking to our neighbors who have lived here their entire lives, it seems like our land, at least for the past 50+ years, hasn’t been much besides horse pasture. When you’re just growing grass for horses to graze on, it doesn’t matter much if there are rocks in the ground the way it does when you’re growing vegetables.

So for the past couple of weeks, a large part of our time has been devoted to pulling out rocks in preparation for planting next year. None of them are huge. Many are fist-sized, some smaller, some bigger. But picking rocks out of the ground can only be described as backbreaking work. I feel like a child in New England in the 1700s, a region notorious for its rocky soil, and you start to realize why farmers had a bunch of kids- we definitely could have use the help on this task! We’ve been dumping them into the foundation of the old barn with the hope that maybe by the time our fields are rock-free we’ll have a nicely graveled patio there!

More exciting, with the change from October to November, it’s garlic planting time! The timeline I always learned for garlic is “plant on Halloween, harvest on the Fourth of July” and this year, we were right on schedule. Because we are scaling up so much from the amount of garlic we grew last year and because we lost so much of our seed garlic to rot in the spring, we had to buy in some organic garlic seed in order to have enough to plant. Unfortunately, I seem to be a carrier for garlic bad luck this year, because when we started to separate out the individual cloves for planting, at least half of one variety was rotten! However, we were able to get in touch with the seed company right away and a new (hopefully rot-free) batch is set to arrive Friday. It feels like real progress to get our first crop in the ground, even if we won’t be harvesting it until next summer!