Monday, May 3, 2010

Farming ...Take II

Well last year this time I was posting pictures and gushing about how we were going green! After days of weeding with no progress followed by weeks of rain the 'garden' idea was drastically reduced to just a couple of cucumber, wax bean, and tomato plants in Auntie Peggy's flower beds....that she alone tended. 

Grandma's back 40 is simply just too far overgrown for our amateur farming skills but we really want this generation to have some clue as to how/why/where their food is produced! We were very near abandoning the idea all together when one of the politicians in our local St. Patrick's Day parade came along passing out seed packets.....we took it as a sign from a higher power.


So, here we are back at Auntie Peggy's...clearing the 'prairie' just as our pioneer ancestors were required to do in order to have a farm. While Mari struggled with sod removal...




Julia was planting the first of our 'crops'! With the guidance of the only person in the family with any skill at keeping plants alive and thriving!! 

Now, at this point I do feel compelled to give complete disclosure....my husband spent his first 17 years of life working on his family farm. According to all reports [from siblings at family parties] their kitchen plot, which they refer to as the 'haggart' [no idea what so ever as to how it's really spelled or from which Irish word it's derived] was rather sizable! A family of 10, which included 7 boys ate for a year off of the spuds, turnips, peas, and cabbage grown in this garden!!!! I am often entertained with stories of boyhood antics when he was supposed to be weeding or such. Every February since we were married I've heard how it was time to "set the spuds" in Ireland. I've heard explanations of how a potato was 'rated' for human consumption and know that the rest were fed to the livestock...oh, but you have to cut them up for the cows first or they will choke on a spud!! In thirteen years I've heard a LOT about farming....but he is no longer on a farm and has no intention of ever working a "haggart" EVER AGAIN!! We have supermarkets in the US so why on Earth would we want to work so hard for our food is his opinion?!?!?!

So we are on our own in this venture. Two middle aged women raised in the concrete jungle of Chicago leading two suburban princesses....


into the world of farming.....guess it's a good thing she's not still in Guatemala, huh?!?!



Hoping that we can nurture these tiny sprouts of peas and cucumbers...



and peppers...and radishes...and onions....and carrots....and tomatoes ...and darn that's a lot of plants....into a healthy crop of both body and soul!!!!

2 comments:

  1. Well we are up and running here, we start all of our seeds in the house and then when they have sprouted they move out to the greenhouse. Joe already has in his spinach, romaine, potatoes, peas and onions and they are all coming up,I had to spray then to keep frost off them the other day, freaking fantastic. Everything else has to wiat until the end of the month or it will freeze. Now this year I finally got my kind of garden, I don't like veggies so I now have in my raspberries, strawberries and blueberries. I also have a bunch of fruit tree's but even with my deer fecing they seem to get most of it, so mostly we walk down to my moms and eat all of her stuff. YOu know a rotatiller would have cleared your area for you, or you could have sparyed it last fal to actually kill the grass and then roatilled or dug it up. Good Luck!

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  2. yay. that looks like fun. and thanks for the irish history lesson. very intriguing.

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