Twenty minutes later, he called and said, "I don't think the truck will make it." So he turned around and came back.
Which stinks especially because we're buying the bull from an Amish man, and have no way, other than through a centrally-located answering machine, to determine how long he waited for us. Bummer, bummer, bummer.
Hopefully the repair man tomorrow will be able to get the vehicle in working order.
The weather was warm, but incredibly windy. Phil and Jadon worked on the front of the greenhouse: they trimmed the plastic and began building a frame for a door.
I opened our tote of potting soil, mixed it in the correct 3 parts soil to one part water, and made soil blocks. Today and tomorrow are biodynamic root days (meaning, the positions of the planets and stars is such that it helps support root crops especially), so I planted asparagus seeds and red onion seeds. I am probably one or two weeks late on those, but I'm hoping for good results anyway.
I bought a little seed dispenser, but couldn't get it to work well. And since asparagus seeds run $43 for 500 (, I wasn't going to waste one, if I could help it. So I hand seeded most of them (Isaiah finished the rest).
I opened the red onion seed package and stared, amazed. They were tiny, white and black bits, like ash. How will this tiny, odd shaped grit become a round, red ball of pungent flavor?
Onion seeds have a very low germination rate (75%, says the package). Eliot Coleman recommends planting them 5 to a block, so that you can get four live plants. So I dropped them, five by five, into soil blocks.
It took me about three hours to figure out how to get the soil blocks made, to make six hundred, and to plant them with either one asparagus or five onion seeds. I really enjoyed my time in the greenhouse, with Joe and Isaiah playing hide and seek in little boxes, and Jadon running errands for Phil.
And I got to be out of the wind, and just enjoy the afternoon sunshine.
I bet the dirt smells great. When I was reading this I kept thinking of the warm, homey smell of good black dirt and it made me long for spring. If you get a chance can you tell how you made the blocks? Did you mold them, put them in a square pan and cut apart, or something else? I never heard of making dirt blocks and it is very intriguing. I pray your little seeds, planted in faith, will flourish.
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