Saturday, May 4, 2013

Lessons from the Farm #1: Take a large task and break it down into smaller tasks

It has been a long time since I have written for the blog.  The excuse: children.  Not in the traditional sense as in, my children take up a lot of my free time, but as in, my children got older and got phones and devices and games and killed our limited bandwidth every morning before 9:30am.

We finally found an affordable solution to our bandwidth issue through a wonderful local company.

Today I went out to tackle the weeds that had grown among my garlic.


Where is the garlic in this picture, you might ask?  I asked myself the same question.  Looks like a big bunch of thistle.

I took a deep breath and said to myself.  First, create the boundary of the weeding area.  Second, start out by clearing 4 rows of weeds.  That's it- 4 rows.

After 20 minutes of weeding, this was the result.

As I was weeding, I was thinking.  I was thinking that weeding a garlic plot is no different than tackling any other problem or opportunity in life.   At first something looks too big, too impossible, too hard or too risky.  If that happens break the big task into pieces and take it 4 rows at a time.

4 comments:

BoogaJ said...

I completely agree. I used to go out and try to weed *everything* in a mad fit. It made me miserable and then I didn't want to do it again until it was a huge and terrible task. Now I limit myself to one bed, or one section of the garden at a time and it doesn't seem nearly as awful. (I still hate pulling weeds though!)

This is my first year growing garlic -- any tips? Ours is coming up nicely this spring, so I guess we have done something right so far.

Annette said...

Garlic is pretty easy in my opinion. Water and weeding. That's really all garlic needs. You don't want to overwater, but if it doesn't rain and the soil gets dry, water. The toughest part of garlic in my opinion is when to pick it. You don't want to wait too long or pick it too early. Just read up on it and if you aren't sure, pick it in batches so you know for next year.

Jen Nold said...

Hi Annette!
Great to see that you guys are still doing your CSA! I keep track of you from a distance and hadn't seen any activity for a while.
I can completely empathize with your thistles. I am struggling with masses of buckwheat which went to seed in my covercrop last year. Now it's all over the place. Not to mention the thistles. When I start weeding, I call it 'liberation' work - yesterday I 'liberated' the spinach and chard from weeds. And managed to successfully ignore the rest. I think being able to selectively focus is also a very important skill...

As far as garlic goes, for me it works best to plant it in the fall and then mulch it with something so it doesn't get too weedy. It's growing between my strawberries this year... And I go for the 'stiffneck' varieties to have the garlic scapes as well.

Annette - you can see images of my CSA at www.dewittebeek.be

Thinking of you regularly!!!

Cheers,

Jen

Anonymous said...

Do you still have your milk cow?
Anna