NOTE:  HUNTERS' GREENS REGULAR SEASON SHARES ARE SOLD OUT.  WINTER SHARES ARE STILL AVAILABLE

At  last the warm dry weather has arrived.  When last we wrote, we assured our readers that this weather would find Jim out in the fields dawn to dusk, planting everything that is ready and waiting to spread their roots in the soil.  Alas the reality seldom lives up to the vision.

The reality is that Jim's day is chopped into tiny bits of routine and not so routine activities.  The reality is that it is a good day when Jim prepares the ground and plants one bed of one crop each day.  So, as you can imagine, "planting everything, RIGHT NOW" is a task that will occupy Jim from now until November.

The last couple days are examples of Jim's typically atypical routine.   Jim's day begins sometime between 5:30 and 7:30 when Ruby, the "separation anxiety queen" hound dog demands that he come down from the bedroom before she will cease her "woofing".  Jim puts on the kettle, takes the dogs out on a relief run and comes back to prepare the unique exacting diet for each dog, and a less exacting ration for the resident cats.  Simultaneously he prepares coffee and a contintental breakfast for himself and reads some fine literature (currently R.L. Stevenson's "Travels with a Donkey") until his bride awakes to receive coffee in bed.

A few more pet tasks are completed before Jim addresses our livelihood, sometime between 8:00 and 10:00.  First green house plants are watered.  Then in warm weather like Thursday, Jim begins the heaviest tasks of the day that are more pleasant before it gets warm.  Often, as on Thursday, he starts by loading composted horse manure into a wheel barrow and spreading it over the beds to be planted that day.  On Thursday, it was to be kale and lettuce.

Jim had the first wheel barrow to the kale bed, when he decided that he really should dig out the Johnson grass at the edges of the kale bed, before he spread the manure.  And while he was at it, he found himself digging out the Johnson grass at the ends of the the adjacent beds as well.  Eventually, he realized that he'd never get the kale in if he continued this way, so he returned to spreading manure.

The manure was almost spread when it was time to put the oatmeal onto boil for our second breakfast around noon.  After breakfast number two, Jim finished spreading manure, spread lime and tilled the kale bed deeply to a fine consistency.  The soil was almost to the perfect moisture content for tilling.

A few details of the afternoon escape us, perhaps a half hour fretting about how we will serve 25 new customers at a high tech corporation, or putting final touches on the new green house, but by dinner time the kale was mostly planted.  Dinner is preceded by a dog walk.  Diane had requested "something with cilantro in it" for dinner, so Jim was inspired to prepare his version of enchiladas verde or enchiladas suize.  This consists of a meat filling (some left over petite sirloin we bought for the dogs in this case) inside corn tortillas with a tomatillo green sauce, and sprinkled with jalepeno jack cheese.  Needless to say, he spent more time on dinner than he'd planned.

After dinner he finished up planting kale and finished out the remainder of the bed with a small crop of direct seeded swiss chard.  In the evening, Jim finds himself too weary for ambitious tasks, so it is a good time to scoot down the rows on his bum, catching up on light weeding.  He thought he'd finish up a row of onions and thin the carrots.  Well, he got the onions finished anyway.  He staggered into the house about 8:30.

Friday was similar in its routine aspects with a couple of dramatic twists.  Friday, Jim got to Thursday's lettuce, following the same procedure as the kale, minus the Johnson grass weeding.  Ah, but this was interrupted by a decision that it was warm and dry enough to start watering with soaker hoses (we've got to get those radishes to swell up in two and a half weeks!).  This meant getting out the hoses from the barn and laying them out.  This can be a huge time sink if the hoses need patching, but Friday it went relatively smoothly.

Brenda was here farming Friday, and she and Jim were just getting sidetracked into pondering the fine financial details of two CSAs providing a combined share to twenty-five corporate employees who wanted one invoice from one individual.  They were saved when Diane stomped up waving the $10,000 check the company had just sent, and told them to get back to work, she would take care of it.

Jim was just about to put the lettuce plants in the ground at 4:00 p.m. when a tearful Diane appeared in the field holding the bunny she had been nursing for the last day.  The bunny had just died in her arms.  All other life stops when a pet passes at Hunters' Greens until Jim builds a coffin, digs a grave and lays the beloved family member to rest.  All this took place during dog walk and dinner time.  Jim walked the dogs, threw the leftover enchiladas in the oven and completed the sacred task.

After dinner the lettuce got planted, and rather than thin the carrots, Jim had just enough energy to hill a row of potatoes.   Again he staggered in around 8:30.

Now it's Saturday.  All the spring crops still need planting RIGHT NOW!  Its almost time to plant the summer crops.  The carrots still need thinning, and the field grass is waist high.  But first Jim thought he'd update our readers.

Farm multi-tasking has its light and dark side.  If we measure progress by crops planted it really sucks.  But what good is another crop planted if the last one is swallowed in weeds.  Besides, no day is the same and few tasks drag on long enough to get tiresome.  And somehow we always manage to be just a few steps behind being caught up.  As Jim's tree planting boss used to say, "It's a good life, if you dont' weaken!"