To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'
My mother, 95 in June, can still recite in their entirety many poems she learned in school. I can recite 1-4 lines of maybe a dozen poems that I've read or heard along the way; we didn't memorize poetry when I was in school. The lines above are the lines I know from The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll.
I'm sitting at Bill's computer in our farm office (my computer is currently downstairs in my quilting space). The office is a former dining room, with a sliding glass door out to the deck, and a view of the farm buildings where there is a lot of activity this morning.
Last year, when we weren't sure what would be possible for selling our produce during a pandemic, Bill only planted a few melons as an additional crop. Even so, the work of taking care of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and apples was at times overwhelming. It was rewarding, though, as he had a good strawberry season and an apple crop so good that he left apples on the trees because he ran out of cooler space for them. The melon crop was fine, but each crop adds a level of complexity - as well as more work - to the growing season.
In the fall, Bill told me he was putting his remaining hoop house/high tunnel up for sale at the auction site he uses. [A larger hoop house was severely damaged several years ago by high winds and had been dismantled and stored in the machine shed.] I was surprised and not surprised. We've been talking about retiring from farming - I retired from full-time work in December 2020 - selling up and moving to a house with less work and maybe closer to our children & new grandchild. Selling the hoop house meant no tomatoes or melons since that's where the plants went to harden off when he picked them up from the greenhouse. And then last week the remaining pieces of the larger, damaged hoop house were sold and picked up by the new owner.
Today, there has been a steady stream of machinery and other equipment being loaded onto trailers and driven off to the auction house. A machine that made raised beds (to plant annual strawberries), a plastic layer, a planter that planted through the plastic, trusses for low tunnel coverings, posts for electric fencing (used around sweet corn fields to slow down the raccoons), electric fencing wire, battery-operated current transmitters, and more have been hauled out of the buildings. A pickup loaded with apple wood cut last spring stands ready to go to the Nerstrand butcher who uses it to smoke various meats.
So far Bill says it feels freeing - he can't imagine going back to trying to juggle so much work in maintaining so many different crops. Since he's retreated from the idea of selling the farm (for now - more on that later), I'm very glad to see that he hasn't retreated from the plan to simplify the operation.
