Jadon Drives the Tractor

On Thursday, I happily saw that the heating mat appears to be working well: I pulled back the plastic in the morning, when a bucket of water on the ground partially froze, and steam came up (and plenty of water condensed on the surface of the plastic). I planted about 3000 more onion seeds, about half of them onion seeds from the last couple of years. Onion seeds do not stay viable for long, so it's possible none of them will sprout, but maybe they will!

I was contemplating several things, including how beautiful the shiny silver seeds were. Silver! What an unusual color in nature! What glorious beauty even in a tiny seed.

Suddenly I had a suspicion that perhaps these lovely speckled seeds were not natural. I sucked one of the seeds and, sure enough, the silver came off. Some kind of inoculant (mycorrhizal fungi, perhaps) coated my seeds. Maybe they will sprout better, but I still felt a bit put out.

I have never done gardening on such a focused scale. I have never had much success with seeds, it seems. The idea that I can put a seed into soil and have it grow, or 50 seeds into soil and have 45 grow, is a heady hope. But then, I've never really looked at A SEED before, either. I look at a packet, and might pour out a handful, but the idea of one-by-one planting seemed absurd. That would take all day!

But it doesn't. I got 3000 counted out and dropped onto blocks in about three hours. That is a good bit of time, but not nearly all day. Not even all afternoon. Maybe this planting business won't be the end of me. And I will surely come out with patience, if nothing else!

I'm both hopeful, yet hesitant to be too excited about market gardening, in part because I have no practical assurance of my own experience that it will work. My gardening, in the past, has been a steady stream of dumping seeds into earth and haphazardly watering; or carefully placing seeds in intricate patterns, just a bit too deep in the earth; or watching a thick stand of baby plants grow up, but not entirely sure if I was supposed to thin, or even what that meant. I haven't been the most successful gardener to date.

Anyway, Eliot Coleman highly recommends starting seeds in soil blocks, made with soil block makers. Using potting soil and water, I press the maker into the soil, and then push out the little blocks into trays, where I can put the seeds. As the seedlings grow, I can "prick out" or "pot on" the little blocks into larger blocks, thus allowing the roots continual growth. No plastic waste, no (or little) root trauma, good success (hopefully). Such an elegant solution to transplants!

Phil worked on the truck with the repair man all afternoon. He also moved the chicken pen over, so the chickens weren't surrounding the greenhouse anymore. As the chickens get closer to the road, some of the neighbors' dogs came over to investigate. In the moment, Phil couldn't find BBs, so he shot the .22 over the dogs' heads, and they ran. I hope they won't be back. Never a dull moment!

The repair man had come an hour late, so he wasn't quite able to finish on the truck. Phil drove into Charlottesville to get a new fuel injector today, and, finally, finished the truck. It sounds great, it runs well. The lengthy truck repair saga now appears to be truly over.

Phil prepped the lower pasture for our yearling heifers. Although age-wise they are ready to be bred, we want to give them a little longer to grow and mature (maybe three more months or so), so we are going to move them away from the grown cows when we get the bull. Jadon drove the tractor up from the lower pasture. He's not a fan of driving big equipment, but based on his smile-grimace, I think he was having a good enough time (that is, until I started snapping photos and cheering; that was a bit embarrassing).

Later, he and Isaiah put all the paper trash we'd stored up for the last five months into a large burn pile and monitored it for three hours while it burned down. (In the future, I won't put boxes of catalogs in the burn pile: they are basically books, and they last forever!)

We keep moving forward, and we're having a great time.