No matter what the old song says – we definitely are not having any lazy days this year. This is our first year of actually selling product. Which has added a huge amount of work to our lives. Last year Ron reached out to a few local restaurants about our shiitakes and we have been selling to three of them. Just this week we sold our first garlic too. Ten pounds of German red specifically requested by one of the chefs. Hoping this was the first of many garlic sales.
And we are in the midst of planning for our second vendor event. On Sept 9 we will be at the Mohawk Valley Garlic Festival, selling our shiitakes and garlic. Getting the garlic ready for sale is easy enough. Wait, did I just say easy??? After harvesting it and hanging it to cure, we now have to clean it. There are several levels of clean. The quickest is, of course to just cut off the dead leaves and beard and give the bulb a rub to get off most of the dirt. Then you can go further by rubbing off a few more of layers of wrapper. Or you can spend serious time getting each bulb down to it prettiest. This involves making a careful decision about how many wrappers you remove. This can go badly very quickly. One too many and you have peeled the whole thing. Which results in that bulb ending in the “our” use pile.
No matter what you plan to do with your garlic, it is hard word getting it from the ground and ready for use. You wouldn’t think it would be so tiring, sitting around a table cleaning garlic. But it is hard on your hands and just wears on you. Makes me understand why we saw some vendors at a garlic fest who left their garlic just pulled from the field.
We also have to get our shiitakes ready to sell in Little Falls. This involves moving sets of 25 logs into the soaking tanks for a 24 hour soak and then moving them back to their racks. They have to be checked on over the next few days to watch for pinning. Ron is finally using the while board I bought him and has our upcoming schedule written out. We still have to prep for our normal weekly sales too.
On Aug 19 we spent the day on THF to getting some work done. The needed part for our brush hog arrived and Ron got it up and running. Jo tackled the mowing while Ron and I worked on weeding around our bushes and trees. We could not even see Ron’s pawpaw trees amidst all the weeds. Twice I caught myself just in time before I yanked the tree out thinking it was a weed.
We can tell we still have a lot of work to do. Including adding more mulch around each plant. Our weeds are relentless and will grow right through the weed cloth we put down. I think the plan is to have a low growing ground cover between the rows in an effort to reduce the work we will need to do. Anything that will keep the weeds at bay.
After mowing for several hours, Jo was ready for a break so she helped Ron with the weeding and I took over with the brush hog. We needed to get the future juneberry patch under control.
We really cannot let it get this overgrown again. Could not even locate our strips of ground cloth until I had mowed a few rows. The stuff is so tall that often I was just knocking it down, not cutting it. If I knew how to use one, it might be more efficient to go old school and break out a sythe.
All of this is part of our plan to getting ready for next spring when I have to ready for next fall when we will be planting our juneberries. This time we are not going to be rock picking (thank God) but need to kill off as many of the weeds as we can. Then a quick tilling and, fingers crossed, we will be good to go.
Oh – in October we have to plant our 2018 crop of garlic. And Ron is thinking of getting new logs inoculated this fall. There is more mowing and tilling to get down for our spring planting of calendula and echinacea. Of course, we have the normal prepping for winter to get done too. Never thought I would be so looking forward to snow fall.