“Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh… now you tell me what you know. ” – Groucho Marx

Hmmm… one might wonder what it would take for a girl to get back on the blogging wagon… just a little taste of spring, and then of course the weather or darkness to drive me indoors. I have been meaning with good intention to write now for at least a month. We all know where the road paved with good intentions leads… alas and however I am finally making a go of it.

A month ago now I got some seeds started on a makeshift nursery bed in my room. It consisted of my 6′ (sometimes referred to as 12) farmer’s market table, an electric blanket that was my grandmothers (surely passing all safety inspections!) and just two bedding boxes left over from last years foray. I rifled through my seeds, gladly passing by those cherry romas that I couldn’t possibly keep up with, and going straight for the Gold Medal and Green Zebra heirlooms. I also diligently planted about a dozen different types of peppers swearing that I would be able to keep them organized and labeled, which lasted all of two weeks… yes, the amount of time it takes for them to germinate. 🙂

So, there remains a beautiful bunch of seedlings happily leaning towards the sun, choosing heliocentricty to any of my mechanical interventions. Rotating the trays is how these guys got displaced from the original labeling system. Perhaps the fruits will reveal the truth later this summer.

I tilled my garden. This is a pretty big deal. Believe it or not, all it took was one year of trying to reinvent the wheel to see that there may be some validity in these time honored traditions. Who knew? I blame my strong German heritage for this streak of stubborn will.It’s amazing what you can do with a few horses under the hood. Most traces of last year’s garden are lying in wait to reincarnate in this season’s bounty. There are a few potatoes that were left to freeze last fall that tease me a bit in my neglect to retrieve all the harvest the plot had to offer, but I take the generous perspective that it was my offering for all that I was given – and that encompasses far more than lambs s, purslane and the stray and strategically planted onion or Chinese red noodle bean. Hours. The incredible hours spent with the dirt and the sunshine and the red wing blackbirds – there is just nothing so gratifying, so nourishing to the simultaneous creative thought process and contemplative witnessing meditation. And I get to do it all over again this year!But, like I said, things are looking a bit different this year. Tilled garden. Straight ROWS of plants. You would hardly recognize this as the same geography. I wasn’t planning to plant potatoes, but I just didn’t have it in my heart to heave three burlap sacks of sprouted potatoes that were resting the whole season through in the basement onto the compost pile. Five rows of potatoes later I was slapping the dirt off my hands with a strong sense of “Wow, this is amazing… I am TWO MONTHS ahead of where I was last year! And I didn’t know it could be so easy!” – the weather this April definitely doesn’t hurt anything. So, in addition to potatoes, the garden is warming encouraging red, yellow and white onions, sugar pea pods, dwarf pak choy, bunching red onions, Swiss chard, three types of kale (specifically dino and red Russian in Tiffany’s honor), arugula, lettuce, daikon radish, mustard (to the chagrin of my bean walking step father), wildflowers, beets, carrots, Chinese kale, popcorn and flint corn. And it’s only April still. This is the kind of spring you fantasize about.This is my brother, Seth, and the one who is responsible for me having any equipment to drive. There may be a few of you out there that are still unaware of my nonexistent mechanical karma… I mean Dad and I would even go so far as to say I had a mechanical karma deficit. Seth, on the other hand, is in my opinion flat out brilliant in this regard. I follow him around the parts store and get distracted by things I could make jewelry out of and bargain hunt for a battery for the Massey and he is ordering plug wires and various other components that may as well be parts for building space craft to an unknown universe, which in effect is kind of what working on trucks and tractors feels like to me. So, I do the books, Seth manages equipment and between the two of us and those we can sweet talk into turning rounds we get some things accomplished on the farm.That’s my seed man turning the soil. That way I could till my garden. 🙂 This is an 8 acre field that has been in cool season hay for two years, but is now part of a SAFE (CRP) program. This summer it will get planted to native prairie. There is a prairie pothole in this plot that we plan to allow to recreate itself. Even plowing you could tell where the soil type was different. The dirt holds so many stories and such a vast history – going slow enough to notice when the engine noise deepens and the plow pulls a little less fluidly slicing through the topsoil you get to learn her history. It is such an incredible feeling to become a part of this land you love. What a dream. What a great place to sink your roots. There are another 16 acres that will be going into wet and messic prairies this year. We plan to experiment with a plot of teff for hay and we are going to start transitioning our cool season hay fields to warm season natives. We are working with a fellow who is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison who is doing research in grazing natives for dairy on suggestions for planting. From a number of sources I have been given notice that what we are working on is fairly cutting edge as far as research is concerned (I’m sure there are some around who have always cut prairie for hay, so I don’t mean to discount that rich knowledge), and that is something I know we are pursuing that would make Dad proud, without a doubt. A powerful way to move forward and meld his spirit and energy into the texture and weave of this land we hold dear. A powerfully exciting and renewing season is upon us.

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson