Blackberry Winter

It’s been cool yesterday and today. The blackberries are blooming.

My friend Laura is in, which means she’s only an hour away from me rather than six. And that she has internet access so we can e-mail more back and forth. And it means she has a letter waiting for her at home. We’ll get to see each other a couple of times this week! Hooray!

The farm produce is going reasonably well. I’ve tried but I don’t have the language or perspective to really describe this form of livelihood, this kind of “littling along“, not yet. We’re not growing specifically for market, no cash crop per se, just a little extra of a lot of the things we grow to eat. We’re not growing in big enough volumes to even make use of the farmer’s markets (which are dens of backbiting politics anyway). Making myself available for deliveries has me (and usually at least some of the kids) actually off the farm at least one day each week. So far, so good, but it is a whole ‘nother paradigm, not trying to produce the most product, not taking the most profit, have relationships with people, provide something of real value, making exchanges without ego involvement.

Today we finally “put in” the garden for our neighbor. Sort of. We’d already planted a bed of potatoes by just putting them on the sod and covering with layers of sawdust and grass clippings. They’d just started coming up and today they got a nice layer of manure. There is a small block of sweet corn planted in hills defined by buckets of manure. There is a row of tomato and pepper plants, a wide “row” of bush beans (tenderettes in this case), and a wide “row” for planting a few summer squash types plus okra. Okra and corn are the only things she specifically asked me to grow. These “rows” aren’t really “rows” obviously, more like rows of bucket of manure hills. When it starts growing, I’ll take photos of this little garden. It is sort of my demonstration garden for the neighborhood. Lots of folks here grow gardens but they will take note that this one is different. I know because every gardener always takes note of everyone else’s garden. In a few more weeks, more sweet corn will be planted, and before that beans and squash will be planted in the corn that was planted today. So that eventually the whole small area will be planted with something, and some areas will produce at least a couple of crops, even with this late start.

I’ve got a little tiny bit of pea jail yet to construct and that’s on the list for this afternoon. Along with getting tomorrow’s deliveries together.