You may have noticed that my recent blog posts have been missing pictures, especially the series on garlic planting. The truth is that my camera was missing. For several weeks I could not find it. I looked over and over, in all of the obvious places and then in the not so obvious places. I looked everywhere, but I could not find it. Finally my husband decided that we would buy me a new one. Our plan for last Wednesday was a date night, shopping for a few items that we needed, including a camera, then dinner at our favorite restaurant, Carrabba’s.

Wednesday morning, as I was dreading shopping for a new camera, (I hate shopping, especially for technology type things) I realized that I was missing something else, my crochet bag. It is a burlap bag that I keep my crochet project in. I remembered the last time I took it somewhere, and it was around the same time that I remembered seeing my camera last. Well hmmm, where-oh-where could it be. I was no longer searching for the camera, but now I was searching all the obvious places and then the not so obvious places for my crochet bag. Ah Ha! there it was, tucked away, in a not so obvious place – a corner of a shelf behind soap making stuff, and yes my elusive camera was in the bag.

As grateful as I was for the finding it, and for the timing of the find, I could not help but analyze how these things became missing. My first thought was, “who put that bag there, I would not have put it there.” After thinking about it for a while, here is what I believe happened. I took my crocheting with me one day while I was tending our farm wagon, so I would have something to work in between serving customers. Upon returning home, I grabbed the bag to carry it in the house, without thinking about it, I put my camera, that also needed to be carried in the house, in the crochet bag to make things easier. When I got in the house I dropped the bag in a corner in the living room, to be dealt with later, and I went on to do other things.

A few days later, I believe my husband was vacuuming the living room, I remember him picking up the bag and saying, “Oh, that’s your crocheting,” I think he put it back where it was. At this point, I think, I decided to get the bag out of his way, so I picked it up and instead of putting it in it’s normal place, which is next to my recliner in the living room, because it would still be in his way as he vacuumed, I mindlessly tucked it in an out of the way spot.

Fortunately this was just a little incident, and it worked out well without me even spending more money on a camera, but it has made me think about how often we get busy and just do things without thinking about our actions, we forget where we put things, we lock our keys in the house or the car, we leave our head lights on and run our batteries down, and while these examples may be frustrating and time consuming, they have little other consequence. However it is this same mindless action that could cause someone to leave something on the stove and cause the house to burn down, or leave a child closed inside a hot car with potentially deadly consequences. The act of rushing through things, of not paying attention to what I am doing could have serious consequence. So, I have decided it is time to slow down, to act intentionally, and to pay attention to what I am doing. To quote my husband, “take care of the small things and the big things will take care of themselves.”

Although I don’t have any photo’s of the actual planting these photos might give you an idea of what we did.

This is the area where we planted around 5000 garlic cloves. It may not look very big for that much garlic, but I have read that one acre can grow 30,000 to 40,000.

This piece of lattice is what we put down on the ground, as our grid, we plant only in the rows that have 4 spaces across. With my husband on one side and me on the other we each do the two rows closest to us. Then we move this piece of lattice to the next part of the row and do it all over again. Each time we complete one lattice (grid) we have put in 64 cloves.

The sticks in the above photo are what we use to poke holes in the ground, through the lattice, to put the cloves in. My husband cut these for us last year when the soil was wet and clumpy. They make a hole that is just the right size and depth for planting the garlic clove. When they are not being used for planting garlic, they are at home, on display, in our living room, so we know where to find them next year.

This is the back field that I spent about a total of 4 hours, over a two day period, cutting with the tractor and brush hog.

Until next time 🙂

My husband made a comment the other day that, “we must have the cleanest kitchen in the county.” I don’t think this comment was because our kitchen looks that clean, but probably because he has seen me cleaning it so much. The reason I have been cleaning it so much is because I have been using it so much. In just one day last week I put a roast with veggies in the crock pot, then I started a pot of soup that would be for the following days dinner. I then made a batch of soap (pumpkin spice), cleaned some beeswax, then made some pumpkin bread. In between each task I was washing, drying and putting away dishes and wiping down counters. After all was said and done I cleaned the floor and of course took out the trash. There have been several days this week that my kitchen has been busy like this, cleaning beeswax, making face, hand and body balms or lip balms, cooking squash or pumpkins for eating, freezing, making pies, bread, and most recently pumpkin fruit leather in the food dehydrator, as well as cooking three meals a day and canning the left over vegetable soup. The clean-ups continue between each task, but no, I don’t believe I have the cleanest kitchen in the county, and I don’t believe I would want to. If I were to see a perfectly clean kitchen I would think that it is simply a show case, and not used for so many practical purposes as mine.

The other thing I have been experimenting with is candle making. I plan on posting about this soon.

While I’ve been busy with all of my kitchen projects, my husband has been tending to the farm. He finished the harvesting of the pumpkins and squash, the peppers, eggplant, cabbage, carrots and swiss chard. He brought in several truck loads of horse manure to be spread in the gardens before he puts in the winter cover crop. He also checked all of the bee hives. We lost one. We are not certain why, but the hive was completely empty when he checked it. He took one full box of honey from one hive, and since it does not have frames we will harvest (package) this as honey in the comb. He decided to leave each hive with an addition box full of honey for the winter. In the spring, when the bees begin making food again, if there is honey leftover we will harvest it then.

Until next time 🙂

I’ll be adding another post soon, but today I plan on being on the tractor mowing the field. It’s time to cut it now that the frost has killed off the wild flowers, so the bees are not in there foraging. I haven’t had much time on the tractor this year and I miss it. So I am looking forward to today. 🙂

The sun was shining, the wind was blowing, the ground was dry, our minds were set on getting the rest of the garlic planted, and thank God our bodies did not object. Monday morning turned out to be the perfect time to get the rest of the garlic in the ground. Oh how happy we are to have this done, and how thankful we are that the weather has been so perfect for this task. Last year we learned how difficult this job can be when the ground has excessive amounts of moisture (can you say mud), and in past years we have learned how physically challenging it can be to our bodies (both now in their 6th decade) when we were working under the gun (marathon planting) because my of husbands limited time at home. So, with 5000+ cloves in the ground, I say WOO HOO! and Thank God! the garlic is in, and now we can move on to other tasks.

Since it rained on Friday, the only work we did on garlic was separating the bulbs of S&H Silver into individual cloves. This is the variety that we will plant the most of, so there were about 16 lbs. of these to take apart. Again, a lot of work. Saturday was a beautiful fall day, we started planting in the late morning and planted about a row and a half, first a few hundred Spanish Roja then S&H Silver, before we decided to break for lunch. With the added moisture in the soil from Friday’s rain, the planting seemed easier.

We decided to take advantage of this glorious weather and work some more after lunch. So taking frequent breaks for stretching, to prevent our muscles from stiffening up on us, we planted the rest of the S& H Silver and worked until near dark. At the end of the night we had approximately 3600 garlic cloves planted and mulched, and we could still move. We thanked God for the great weather and how well the planting was going, and we asked His blessings on our efforts.

I thought we might take a break from planting today, but being another beautiful day and since our bodies were not in too much pain, we decided to get started on planting the Chesnok  Red. Again we took frequent breaks from the planting (on our hands and knees) to get up and walk around and stretch. That is one of the advantages of working for yourself. We planted somewhere in the area of 1200 Chesnok Red and called it a night with only a couple hundred left to plant.

Several times during this process my husband has reiterated, “this is a lot of work” and “nobody in their right mind would be a garlic farmer,” so be warned, if you ever meet a garlic farmer, (I guess this includes me) they might be a little crazy. These statements also made me realize that I have three things going for me. First of all, my husband loves me very much and therefore is willing to participate in my crazy (garlic farming) idea, secondly, my husband is not afraid of hard work, and lastly my husband was born with garlic in his veins.