Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Farming

I celebrated the time change this weekend by drilling holes in my plastic planters! I would have drilled additional holes in my wooden planters except that the base of those are half inch thick slabs of solid hard wood  that made my drill cry.

I also planted more potatoes. Today I planted even more. Like my ancestors of yore, I am a potato farmer. I'm not done yet, I'm due another variety any day now.Thus far I have planted 1) Yukon golds x2 2/29, 2) All Blue x1 3/10 3)All Blue x1, Red x1 3/12 . I'm including those deets so that I can stop having to remember all that.

I would not have gone with the reds except they are the earliest of the early varieties and my others are either late or middle season and 65 days is a close to instant gratification that you can achieve with potatoes.

In order to make my life easier I un-winterized my backyard water faucet and plugged in my new cheap hose - that I thought was so cheap that it didn't even come with a washer but it did, it fell out on my kitchen table. Because that's where hoses belong. On our kitchen tables.

I also planted some left over spuds in the same area I planted the pumpkins last year. If you order expensive seed potatoes you get very few of them, if you shop around online and order less expensive seed potatoes you get a lot of them and this forces you to think out side the bin. And this is good.

Last year I had two bins of potatoes this year I'm going to have possibly seven. And then my peppers and tomatoes and beans and peas. it could be a lot worse, I'm reading about a guy who farmed tilapia fish in his backyard in Brooklyn!, and he's making a good case for them. Its a good thing I go on vacation every year because I could get really crazy with the back yard farm thing. It is also a good thing my backyard is so small because I would love to be able to raise my own chickens and bees and goats and now I know about tilapia. Its a good thing a tenth of an acre can support so little. And zoning! thank gawd for zoning. Because I would go nuts.

In a perfect world I would have a huge place where I could have a Christmas tree farm  for the winter and a corn maze in the autumn and probably pumpkins for sale in the fall and watermelons in season and a large pond for summer fishing and and winter time ice skating and probably a pick-your-own-apples orchard for picking your own and selling apple pies, and of course bees for honey and rental hives and goats! I would also keep goats to rent out as green lawn care and to produce the milk I would learn to make cheese and soap from. Clearly, in my fantasy world I I have a lot of money and am a very  fast learner and I am extraordinary talented and I have 30 hours a day to get things done.

I think everyone should be very happy  I have no money, am a slow learner and am not talented and prefer to spend a lot of time in front of the TV.

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