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Laughter in the Night July 12, 2010
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Laughter in the Night
July 12, 2010

 
Larry awoke at 2:30 AM Friday night. Of course, since he did, so did I. He got dressed somewhat and remarked that he thought he saw a light outside and was going to investigate. Because of our recent history of enticing criminals to “shop” our farm at night, he took his rat shot with him, and the flashlight. Light to find light....

He found nothing alarming so he returned to bed, but now we were both wide awake, so naturally we talked about everything that has gone wrong on the individual farms.

I started with his farm.(Ladies first.) I commented that next year, I was going to grow the corn on this, the city farm. The last couple of years his corn has been under siege by raccoons, wild hogs, sudden freezes, floods, you name it. I’m getting tired of that, and we are not even counting the worms. We take those for granted. Almost an asset, as the hens love them and congregate around the corn table at the farm stand, waiting for us to cut off the corn tips with the worm intact and pitch it to them. We also maintain a bucketful to reward the hens still in the Hen House, the complacent girls.

He defended his corn history by countering how good it was three years ago when he brought in a trailer load of devastatingly sweet “Fantastic” corn. Yes, but that was then, and this is now. We have to have corn next year. I can’t take a third failure on corn. I realize that corn takes a lot of land and few farmers make money on it, but it is such a jolly crop. It make people really happy, and that in turn makes us happy.


It is a challenge to grow vegetables in Texas. The humidity, the violence of the weather changes, the insects, the wild life, diseases, weeds.... If we were like the farmers who grew only three crops, we’d have been out of here long ago. But since we know we will have definite failures -- not which crops will be hit, but we know that some most certainly will -- we grow as many different things as we have land for, hoping that some of it will survive and thrive. (And it always does.)

We traded off dilemmas on each farm. He reminded me that this year’s strawberry crop was a success, only because he insisted on planting half the 3,000 crowns at the Gause farm. My half looked fantastic in early April; he even said my planting was better than his which was merely splendid. You-picking had just started here, and people were happy. And then they were sad, as the plants started dying, rapidly. We stopped the you-pick and relied on the berries coming in from Gause, and sent a couple specimens of my dying plants to the lab. Result: fungus caused by the cold wet winter, sluggish drainage of my clay soil, and warm weather that caused the fungus to “explode” into a killing machine.

A bit depressed once again over the memory of my failure, I countered with the sand that came in on his berries. They couldn’t be washed until they were in the customer’s kitchen, so they looked rather dim. It took a leap of faith for folks to buy them, but a washing would spark them up later. He said next year he’s going to set the berry beds further apart and plant a cover crop between them that will keep the sand from blowing on the fruit. His sand is the sugary type and it lifts off with the slightest breeze. That knowledge, however,  didn’t keep me from being horrified at how the berries looked on the market table.

Soon, we were laughing, wonderful deep laughter, that to any criminals lurking outside, would have seemed maniacal. Well, as Larry’s grandmother Meme used to say, “You might as well laugh as cry.” And she was right, it was very cathartic. Every problem we ticked off was punctuated with laughter. Crazy fun. Much better than crying, and as a bonus, it didn’t cause congestion as crying does.

We still deal with the problems, as all folks do, in every aspect of life. Larry again filled his propane tank with the attached “pear burner” to heat up the stink bugs plaguing his newest tomato crop.(The stinkers finally ruined his last crop, which of course we revisited while laughing.) Meanwhile, I’m dealing with the extravagance of weeds. He has magnificent weeds too, but since no one sees his farm, he is not bothered by shame.

And, we’ve had more rain here than there. So the weeds are a big issue, and naturally this is the year that all the tractors break. When the tractors break, there can be no serious mowing. Today was a mowing day, following last week’s six inches of rain, but in the midst of it all, hydraulic fluid started leaking and that was that with Lil(ian T.) Tractor. Back to the barn for it. Tom and I were relegated to the weed eater and the tiny electric mower, and now the weeds are laughing too.

Especially the bindweed, the wild morning glory, which I kind of like if it’s not on the crops, as the little purple flower is indeed lovely. But it has completely covered my “kitchen” garden, which is misnamed because nothing in it comes into the kitchen since one of the problems some years ago occurred when I discovered the 1840s cistern by inserting a leg up to my thigh into it. Twice. Then the next week Cousin Claire discovered it in the same manner. (We cousins are slow to learn it appears, or maybe we think we can walk on water.) No solution to the problem, so the kitchen garden became the cistern garden and had to be fenced to keep visitors’ children from running their legs off into it. The cistern garden became home to flowers, and now bindweed. It has climbed all over everything that ever lived, and tiring of the roses, irises, daylilies, and daturas, the bindweed is now trying to take over the back porch and next week the farm house. Sigh


We laughed on for an hour and then finally fell asleep. Had to, for the next morning was market day and we had to be out there setting out the produce, if we were lucky to have any.....

Carol Ann

For the produce report: http://www.boggycreekfarm.com/   Scroll down a bit please...there will be quite a lot of produce.

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