Man...I Feel Like a Farmer

With apologies to Shania Twain.

It's not exactly harvest time, but some crops do come up early. Way back when we first moved here, I dug a couple of garden beds and planted twenty-five garlic bulbs. Today, we pulled them out of the ground. It was a pretty good feeling.

Yes, that's my lovely wife, who actually gave me permission to put this picture on the blog for everyone edification. Aside from the rhubarb (which we didn't plant, and only harvested by accident), this is the first crop we've grown and harvested on our farm. Technically, we're just in 'garden' mode, since we're not doing mass growing. But still, it's a pretty big moment for us. The city folk have gone country.

We got twenty bulbs out of the ground, plus one that she had pulled earlier, so twenty-one out of twenty-five. That's not a bad ratio. And the bulbs are big, too. The plan, though, is to save most of it for planting again in late October. We're probably going to do something similar with the rest of our first crop of vegetables; saving as much as we can for planting next spring sounds like a good idea. However, if we find they're extra-tasty, we might just buy a bunch of seeds and start over in the spring.

And this is the front of the chicken coop; there was a tractor in the way yesterday, so I didn't get a decent picture of the front. But there it is, along with the additional chickens my wife picked up today after mass. There are now ten chickens in there; we also have the three Cemanis, who are staying in their own hutch for the time being, and the three roosters on death row back in the chicken tractor.

All in all, it's been a pretty busy day. And the weird part is, I'm actually enjoying it. Crazy, I know. But it turns out that while you can take the man out of the city, you can also take the city out of the man, or at least a part of it. Food for thought.