May 2011

I want to write about what really happened today. Today we pulled down the corn stalks and fed them to a neighbor's heifers. But I need to go back to May. I'm trying to catch up to real time here.
In May, it rained. It rained nearly every day. The ground was soaking, there were constant flood warnings, and there was no way the garden could be plowed up. So we left town. We flew to California as a surprise for our son's 30th birthday. We met our son and daughter-in-law at a lovely restaurant in El Segundo and we all kept it such a great secret that he was truly surprised. We spent four wonderful days in sunny (not rainy) California playing with our grand-daughter and having a great time.
And, another surprise -- when we got home and drove in the driveway, our new vegetable and fruit garden had been plowed up! Lovely, lush, fertile loam -- our farm soil merely waiting for us to put in rows of veggies and new fruit trees. Or so it seemed to me at the time.
The first thing was to put up the deer fence. What state isn't crawling with deer? Michigan is no exception, so without the fence, the whole exercise would be pointless. Putting up the deer fence took the better part of 4 days. We fenced in 5,000 square feet. So my new house was 2,000 square feet and my new garden was more than twice that. Undaunted, we ordered the fruit trees.

Oops. I don't know how to fix this yet. You'll have to turn your head sideways to see us planting our first dwarf apple tree. The catalog has promised 3 bushels of apples by the 3rd year. We'll see.
By the end of May, we had planted 20 tomatoes, 16 peppers, potatoes, spinach, beans, cabbage, broccoli, lima beans, beets, carrots, cucumbers, radishes, peas, garlic, onions (300 onions!), eggplant, and shallots. And that was just the first wave. We had high hopes, high opinions of ourselves, sore backs and dirty fingernails.
But we were farmers. We were gardeners.
We were insane.