Farmer’s Tan

As the school year winds down to a finish and most teachers look forward to a summer off I have already scheduled four meetings for the summer and solidified some time when I need to come in to school to work.   My travels this summer will be limited to mostly Boston.  However with the recent addition to Cheers on Netflix Instant Streaming I can’ wait to get to Boston.   I have already watched 33 episodes of the 275 episodes available to me.  So I am missing Boston quite a bit.

However I digress.  I will have to work quite a bit this summer, but I am OK with it, because a lot of it will involve our garden, and as you can see by the photos below we are really humming along with it.  More importantly I am learning a ton about gardening.   At this point I am confident in my ability to grow kale, broccoli, asparagus, collards,and strawberries, plus harvest them correctly.   This Saturday we went to Weaver’s Way Farm where we get our materials and got a little education on our summer crops.   Oh yeah, we are going to nail it this summer.   A variety of peppers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, watermelon, sugarbaby melon, eggplant, cucumber, blackberries, raspberries, and lettuce.

I am taking a real interest in growing tomatoes, for instance making sure the soil has calcium to prevent deficiencies in the soil which prevent bad fruiting.    Sure not having optimal soil can still give you tomatoes, but when you have the perfect soil you get some great tomatoes.   So Monday Ken and I get into the garden, start putting metal trellis loops around the tomatoes (yes, we planted some last week and they are already bending under the weight of tomatoes).  I prefer the metal trellis over the stake.      We will planting our herbs in between the tomato plants to maximize space and soil development, and we have reflective ribbon to hang on the trellises to scare birds and prevent them from eating our crops.

Yes there is no doubt that this garden has changed the way I look at my life.  I love working the earth to provide food for people.  There is something so satisfying about having dirt under your nails, pulling weeds between plants, walking up and down the rows of beds and surveying what is literally the fruits of your labor.

I think this garden is a testament to what people can do when they work together and both want to do an excellent job.   There are a lot of teachers at my school who have just cashed in their chips and don’t want to do anything but exactly what they have to do.   Work grinds to a stop and collaborative efforts cease to exist.  These are the people who need to go because they are basically salt on the soil of the educational garden (like the full circle reference there?).

Now luckily Ken and I get along very well.   However we had an incident on Friday which made us think we needed to take a step back from one another.   As he was driving to lunch we were looking for a parking spot, I saw one and began telling him to go left, he didn’t like the spot because his car doesn’t have reverse and couldn’t get in, and without thinking he says “I don’t have reverse KATE!”

We both got real quiet and realized we may be spending too much time together, his wife’s name is Kate.   However that did not stop us from going to work in the Garden on Saturday and then out to dinner with our significant others and his offspring.