Columbus Day is for Garlic Planting
Everyone in the Northeast remembers Columbus Day Weekend as the first weekend for the last half of the summer where we had three beautiful days in a row. Perfect for getting the garden together for the 2012 planting season. A big thanks to Team Feikens, Tony and Tim, Naaz, and Francesca and Caroline, who all spent time down in the garden doing a tremendous amount of work. In Dave’s case, he also sacrificed his knee to a sledgehammer, but that’s another story.
The day started with this pile of 120 landscape timbers and 21 12-foot lengths of rebar.
This last year we let the garden fallow…just didn’t have the energy, needed to recharge after the loss of my mom who was part of the inspiration for much of the planting we do, a million other reasons. I’m glad we did, for the above reasons but also because this was one of the rainiest seasons on record and it would’ve been a tough year to be organic.
Dave got to work on the rebar, Tony and Tim drilled holes in the ends of the landscape timbers.
Lucy provided encouragement:
After a couple hours, we had enough rebar cut and timbers drilled to head down to the garden to get started.
Loaded up the Kubota, with the rototiller on the 3-point hitch. This machine has saved the day a hundred times on the farm, it’s the best purchase I’ve ever made for farming. I managed to get it stuck almost immediately in a deceptively dry-looking corner of the garden which was actually soaked, unfortunately no pics of Dave and Tony helping me put boards under the tires to jimmy it out.
This is jumping ahead a few steps, but you can see what our plan was. Five 40’ x 4’ planting beds in each section, this particular day we were working on the northeast and northwest garden quadrants.
Once I’d measured/marked and rototilled the beds, we set down the landscape timbers, and drove in 1’ rebar in either end with a sledge. It was during this time that Dave decided to put his knee between the sledge and the bar he was trying to hit. It looked like it hurt.
This first bed next to the raspberries is the garlic bed - Julia and Lee shucked all the garlic from last year up top:
And then they planted it all. Naaz showed up to help. Stars! You can see the beds taking shape here.
By the time we got to the end of the day, we were all beat and ready for the Michigan game. I wasn’t sure Dave was going to move, he stayed in this position for a *long* time.
It was beer o’clock by this point, I went up and served up brats on the grill, beans, and Creamery ice cream, and we all took in the Michigan game.
Meanwhile, the weekend provided some of the finest views of early fall from the garden.
Frenchie (and Caroline) came out on Monday and we finished up the back three beds. There are still two beds to do before winter, if any of our other csa members want some fine weather and work in the coming weeks.
We’re also planning on planting green manure - probably winter wheat - in each of the beds, that’ll probably happen the weekend of October 22.
I drove to the store to get lunch…not a bad view over Warwick Valley, down by Manos’ farm.
The final evening of the weekend gave us this sunset. All in all, a great Columbus Day weekend, full of work, but very satisfying to get our hands in the dirt and wind up with a great framework for next year’s CSA.
