Angel's Farm Reflection 13

Angel Arias                Silk Tree Farm Reflection                  4/2/13

Today we did a lot of planting, which is happening pretty frequently since it is pretty much the beginning of the season and pretty much all the plants should be going into the ground right about now. In the morning, I’d noticed that the sprouts from Tuesday had grown more. I’d also been sent out with the task of gathering eggs from the chickens that morning, a task that seemed pretty simple and intrinsic. But I suppose the chickens used their psychic mind-prognosis abilities to predict my walking patterns and knew that I would be coming to collect their bounty, because a bunch of them were just lying around in their egg box, refusing to move and denying me ability to collect their eggs. I tried to get some of them out of the way but it wasn’t very effective; so I grabbed what I could and told Cathy what was going on and that was that. We’d later be feeding the sprouts to the chickens, but first we planted some more seeds into the ground; which consisted of digging trenches like last time, filling them in, and slashing at detrimental roots. Garlic, and some other plants, they may have been chive. In any matter, I grabbed some compost from the greenhouse, filled in the trench and then started planting some garlic into the ground. I suppose something I didn’t know before was that when garlic grows, it grows upwards out of the upper part of the onion in things I started calling by the moniker; “onion strings”. They’re strings that stretch out of the onion, and I didn’t really notice that until morning when we were in the kitchen eating, and I noticed some attached to an upper part of an onion. I inquired about it, and then I asked if it was possible to eat. “I don’t know,” was the answer I got, and that was pretty much good enough for me, besides it was only an onion piece. Picked a piece and ate it; pretty strong garlic flavor, but really good, probably for a soup or something rather than a garnish. But anyway; back to the farming. I’m sure that garlic also has quite the root system, but I just found it pretty interesting that garlic had those grassy shoots that went up instead of the fanned-out leaves a lot of other plants have. After planting the garlic (Which, some of it was rotted/rotting, so we’re being hopeful) I helped plant the chives as well. We also checked up on the goats during it, but after we were done planting we gave the rest of the plants, the ones that hadn’t been watered yet, quite a drink, especially the ones we’d just planted. It’s fun to see plants you work on to cultivate sprouting up and growing; procreating the bounty that has grown to fruition through your efforts. From this point, we weren’t very sure what to do, and we observed some of the plants for a while before concluding that we would try to go to the front yard and clean it up a bit; get rid of some of the more useless plants so Cathy could later till it up and convert it into a garden. I dug out some front yard plant, but efforts to successful separate and pot it were a bit less than successful, so we then resolved to go figure out what to do again. After a bit more discussion, we again decided that we would do work on the blog and upload photos, then head outside and start planting. Or take pictures of the plants we’d planted to show the progress that they had made and the work that we had done so far, as well as the work had done more recently. It took a little while to get every post up because the pictures (From the days that we took pictures, anyway) were kind of all over the place, plus it was at this point that we ate. Eventually though we got all of them up, and by that time there wasn't much time in the day left. So we went outside and took pictures of plants all over the place, it was cool because a lot of them were really starting to come up. I can’t wait to see them when they’re full-grown though, it’ll be very rewarding and awesome-looking, the last phase of the process. Plus, we can eat some of it, and it’ll also be fun to see kind of what works well and what doesn't  and connect whatever circumstances and valuables…it’ll be really interesting to see things develop and how they turn out. This will be something I really look forward to in the future. After we returned back inside, my ride arrived signaling the end of my day at Silk Tree Farm.