Here we are.
Heavy frost followed by heavy frost, the routine of farm chores now grown drearier. My growing things survived, for now. Peeling back the 100ft row covers to check their status in my tunnels is a daily inspection. It’s remarkable what they’ll take, frozen solid, and yet thaw and live to photosynthesize another day. True resilience.
There is a calm to Winter. A less-ness. Less to do, in a way? Certainly less sunlight to do it in. It can be utterly gray and wearisome, of course. But the slowdown gives time to prepare for the sunny season. And like most growers my big plans occur to me in the Winter.
But we had garlic to plant today. This kind of farming is all about the never-stopping. Success by succession. Total failure (as in no lettuce coming from the farm) can be mostly avoided by diligently planting numerous times, all year, so the inevitable microfailure is accounted for.
The world outside is basically a fridge right now. Nothing will grow, really, but it will live and last, since it had a chance to establish in better times. In the case of the garlic, it will rest in the field and gradually develop until harvest next June. Some growing things are slow like that.
I spent the rest of the workday doing ‘crop cleaning’. It’s a process of stripping back bad or damaged leaves from the various crops I’ll harvest the next several months. This is a thankless, tedious task. Without it, however, plant disease could spread, and the critical energy that should be used on new, healthy harvests could be wasted on unusable growth instead.
Went to the new tea lounge downtown with Merc tonight. Got an orange jasmine tea. Worked on this very blog while she talked with the lady about tea and owning a small business.
There’s so much to it, honestly. At our best we sway to the polyrhythm of a hundred different pressures and learn to embrace the unanticipated. True resilience.
At other times we take these little opportunities to breathe. Watch sports, or the animated Grinch movie. At this and every time, we thank God for the slowdown.