10/24/2019
Dear Farm Journal,
It’s time to plant the garlic. Well, technically, I think we are getting to it a little late. The cloves have been sitting broken up in a pail in the pack shed. The beds have been worked up. The mulch has been chopped, but we just haven’t gotten to actually sticking it in the ground, until today. Well, better late than never as they say. When we set out to plant a crop, I feel like we almost always underestimate how much prep time we need. There’s prior crop removal, broad forking, rotovating, adding nutrients, measuring, posting planter lines, collecting seed, getting equipment started and set up properly (9 times out of 10 there is some sort of tractor hold up). It’s not like we just skip out the door and plunk seeds in the ground, or jump on a normal running tractor and drive back and forth in straight lines. There is a pregame and post game to this magic. Once the seed is in the ground, there’s watering, mulching, then weeding and maybe trellising and pruning, more weeding, before finally, the harvest. When I think of all the hours of labor that go into vegetables, it is a little mind boggling what we pay for food.
~Joy