Cowboys and stockmen sometimes use the term "dirt farmer" as a derogative term for a vegetable farmer. Certain jobs make me think that they are right. One of the helpers on my farm termed these jobs "crawling and grubbing" jobs. They involve dirty knees, dirty fingernails and very good tunes on your ipod. Today's c&g job was uncovering the garlic. Luckily, its one of the first jobs you can do in the spring and my enthusiasm, at least for the first hour and a half is pretty good. Garlic is planted in the fall and is covered with mulch to keep the ground from freezing and thawing over the winter. In the spring, the garlic struggles to get through the mulch and has to get help being liberated. If you wait too long to liberate the garlic, it gets leggy and anemic under the mulch. On my knees, I dig at the mulch half way across the bed and fold it back towards me revealing some of the garlic. I then put me knee on the mulch to keep it in place. When this is repeated on the other side, the three rows in the bed are uncovered. This is one of the jobs I do in incremental steps. After about 90 minutes, getting a snack or checking my email seems vital and has to be done right now.
(The garlic pictured at the right is not mine, just a good example of garlic)
