What the Hell Was I Thinking?!

Dear God, that was a day and a half compressed into ten hours. I got a lot done, but I'll be paying for it in the morning.

So, Week One is done. Since I 'retired' from my job, I planted potatoes, carrots, and onions, as well as dealing with pigs, chickens and rabbits. And driving kids back and forth. I forgot about that part of the deal of being home. Well, it's time to be a dad, anyway.

So, today started bright and early; I was working by seven o'clock. And it was raining. Drizzling, really. Barely any precipitation until the afternoon. So, I got done as much as I could before the rains came. And here are the results of my efforts today:

You can see the garlic to the right; that's as far as I got as of yesterday. The heat was too much yesterday to do any planting, so I did other work instead. But today, there are carrots and onion in the garden.

The tall white stick to the left is the marker for the shallots. They go from the top of the bed to that post. Well, she wanted lots of onions; she's going to get them.

This marker is for the carrots that I planted today. That was from one packet full of seeds left over from last year; it wasn't even a full packet. But it made a lot of carrots. Or, it will. I'm going to stagger my carrot planting weekly; next Friday, I'll plant another packet. The following Friday, another one. I expect I'll be able to do four packets before I run out of space on that bed. I'll have to see if that's enough carrots to start; she might want more. If so, I've got plenty of other rows to fill. But staggering the planting means I can have a regular, continuous harvest throughout the summer. And once the first batch is out, I should have enough season left to get another batch planted. We shall see.

These two beds are full of onions. One hundred feet of onions. I mentioned the shallots; this is the other end of the bed. You can see our next-door neighbour's house in the background. The first sticks in both beds mark the boundary of the yellow onions. Both beds have yellow onions up to those sticks. That's a lot of yellow onions.

These sticks mark the white onions. The shorter brown stick on the right and the tall white stick on the left. Again, lots and lots of onions. I think I planted them five in a row for the most part, so they are close together. That's bio-intensive farming, where there's less space between the plants so as to help crowd out weeds. It works best for plants that don't have extensive root systems, such as carrots and onions, since their roots don't compete with each other. Everything I've planted so far is a root veggie (garlic, potatoes, onions, carrots), so they will all work for the bio-intensive method.

That narrow gap between the two sticks on the right is for multiplier onions. I have no idea what they are, but she bought a box of them, and there were only eight in there. So, they get a small area for themselves. Beyond them and all the way to the shallots' marker are the scallions, or green onions. On the left from the stick to the end of the bed are Spanish onions.

So, as I mentioned, that was a lot of work. Not only did I have the planting to do, but I had to get the beds ready. This is virgin territory; the big garden only saw limited use last year, and that was on the other side closer to the barn. So, I had to make all those beds. Snow shovels work wonders for making the pathways, and the rain helps keep the cardboard down. The cardboard acts as a mulch, eventually decomposing from all the rain but keeping the weeds out of the pathways. The weeds in the beds, on the other hand, I'll have to cull by hand. Still, it helps to have the cardboard down. Except when it's windy. And it's always windy on PEI.

The scary thing? I'm not quite halfway across the garden. And I've still got tomatoes, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, pepper plants, and more to go. Again, what the hell was I thinking? I gave up a comfortable, air-conditioned office job so grub around in the dirt and rain. I must be as crazy as everyone always thought.

If so, the world could use more of that kind of crazy. I wouldn't trade this for anything right now.

Alright, time for some bonus pics. First...a much clearer shot of Samson and Delilah, who have learned that when Daddy comes to the railing, there's usually food involved. Not always, though; this was just for a camera shot.

I have no idea which is which; unless I get a profile from a low angle, I'm not going to know, either.

Finally, here is some inspiration for us all. I mentioned last year that we suffered minimal damage from Hurricane Fiona. One of the things we lost, though, was the heritage apple tree behind the barn, the one we didn't even know about until last year. Fiona uprooted this old tree, which was rather disappointing. But this tree isn't done yet, apparently:

That is a lot of apple blossoms. Here's a closer look:

We're going to get apples this year. We thought we'd be cutting this tree up for wood chips to smoke bacon with (applewood bacon! Yum!). But God had other plans.

Here's the tree from the other side of the treeline. As you can see, it is definitely knocked over. No surprise we expected it to be dead, right? But take a look at the roots:

It's still in the ground, just enough that it's still drawing water and nutrients from the soil, enough to blossom like crazy. It's like the tree knew we'd given it up for dead, and was determined to prove us wrong. And I'm very happy to be proven wrong.

Dannielle wants to fence off this tree and call it 'the garden of Eden'. I can't blame her, really. This tree got taken out by a hurricane and didn't even slow down. There's a lesson there for us all.