Spring Fever

Today, I planted onions.  Or I should say, The Husband and I planted onions while The Girl picked them back up off the ground and put them in a bucket (once she tried to eat one, this is the same girl who eats lemons, but she took it out of her mouth and said 'nasty' before I could get to her to get it out) and The Boy threw them haphazardly down in some kind of ninja move (which The Girl then tried to copy unsuccessfully).

The Help

I should preface this by saying I did not want to do this.  It was probably on my top ten list of things I didn't want to do today.  I guess in the end I should rejoice because I thought I was going to end up cutting up 100 lbs of potatoes (I have psoriasis on my knuckles, and when they get wet for extended periods of time they crack and bleed and get sore, not to mention it would make my fingers raw).  Compared to that, dropping onions isn't that big of a deal.  Still, it's been crazy around the farm lately.  We're knee deep in getting our 2nd We Dig It Ag Day together (we have three weeks and two days to pull everything together before almost 1600 kids+80 FFA students+sponsors+politicians and dignitaries come out to the farm for our event.  Yikes!), plus strawberry season is coming up (if a bit later than I'd like), and CSA signups are still going on (we've got more members than we've ever had at this time of signups, yay!!!)  So honestly after running errands all day, I was anxious to come home and have a minute to check my e-mail and work on some of that work, not go outside and plant onions.

However, we are on a huge push to get these early vegetables planted.  We are behind since the month of February was pretty much horrible weather (it looks like another late start to the strawberry season around here.  Boo!).  This week has been the first week we've been able to get in the field without miring to our shins in mud (trust me, I tried to pull weeds in the strawberry field and it was a disaster, but, I didn't face plant at all!  I am sure I will pay for that good fortune later).  So we've been working double time to get things planted.  Yesterday we disced (not sure on the spelling here and spell check is not up on farming terms) land to get ready to run rows.  I've been wanting to learn how for a while.  I can drive a tractor, but I wanted to go a step further.  I am NOT mechanical at all.  Pulling more than one lever at a time while trying to look forward to drive straight and backward to make sure that end was going well proved to be a little challenging for me (go ahead and laugh, but remember my teacher was The Husband and didn't even explain the levers to me until after argument #1 plus he had it hooked up backwards).  Once I learned the process (and what all the levers did) I managed to do pretty good even if I was a little slow.  Just today The Husband planted beets, collards, kale, radishes, carrots, cauliflower, garden peas, and rutabagas (CSA members take note, this will probably be the first couple weeks of boxes + strawberries).  So I felt a bit obligated to help out since we're on double time.

He got out and threw me to the wolves to get this picture.

It's pretty easy to drop onions.  You just take the onions and place them in the dirt a couple of inches apart.  The ones we planted were spring onions, and they resembled garlic cloves.  It was all good, except they stunk, well, like onions (I do not like onions), and some of them were mushy.  I tried not to think about that as I placed them in the dirt.  I plugged my earbuds in my phone and tried to zone out (well, as much as I could, remember said kids picking up onions and throwing them and all, so of course I had to stop and call them down and explain again that his row needed to look like daddy's and if he wanted to keep getting new clothes and toys and movies he needed to help out every couple of minutes).  In the end I dreaded something that probably took thirty minutes and that's one thing down.  Now to tackle those potatoes...

Sometimes you just have to go old school

ONIONS!