Any finite task

As harvest reached its crescendo, I had little time to do everything I would have liked to have done, such as writing blog posts and going to the bathroom. I thought a lot about a time long ago when I first started graduate school. A faculty member explained the dissertation process as follows: you figure out how to do something; you do it a thousand times, and we give you your Ph. D. From this, I inferred a larger principle that I chant to myself frequently this time of year: any finite task, no matter how daunting, can be accomplished if you just chip away at it.

This principle has guided me through harvesting and trimming 200 onions, digging 75 hills of potatoes, washing thousands of cherry tomatoes and hundreds of red raspberries, and on and on. All of these are finite tasks. Just keep at it. It will get done.

The onion harvest was remarkable. Onions of every variety got to be enormous. Here’s a photo of the rest of about one quarter of the total inventory.



These onions are in a standard wheelbarrow. I can't get my hand all the way around this red onion.

Even though I heard Terry say several times that the rains came back in the middle of August, I never found time to pull up the landscape cloth between the rows of potatoes. When the rains did come, the potatoes did not dry out very fast. I don’t worry much about it when the plants are green as the leaves will pump plenty of water out of the soil and keep the potatoes from rotting. By the end of August, however, the leaves are dead. When we had two days in a row without rain, I pulled up the landscape cloth, and the next day, we dug the potatoes. It was muddy work. Hilda spent the next several days washing potatoes and laying them out on screens in the garage to dry. After a few more days, Terry put the potatoes in boxes and moved them to the root cellar. Dad finished putting the onions in nylons, and we were finally able to reclaim the garage for our cars.

The next weekend, I spent the morning putzing around in the garden. I got my pants a little dirty. I was supposed to be at Jane’s house for lunch. As usual, I was running late. I learned a long time ago to never wear my good jeans to Jane’s because more often than not I will end up doing something that requires being on my knees in the dirt. I quickly changed from the jeans I’d worn in the garden to a clean pair of work jeans from the dresser drawer. An hour later, when I pulled into Jane’s driveway, I looked down to discover that my jeans, which I had last worn for the potato digging, had not come clean in the wash. A fashion faux pas! I would have looked cleaner if I hadn’t changed pants.

Fashion faux pas: The "clean" pants I wore to Jane's house

The girls are just about full size now, but no eggs yet. Shouldn’t be too long now. It’s just getting light when I go out to do my chicken chores these days. For a while there, Gracie hung out on the perch, pacing back and forth until I picked her up, petted her, and set her on the floor. Only then would she run out to the yard to join the others. I mentioned this to Hilda, thinking that Gracie did it every morning. No, Hilda said, Gracie always ran right out when she opened the coop. We thought maybe Gracie liked me best. It seems, however, that she just doesn’t like to go out in the dark. When I was late with my chores recently, she was out with the others right away. Also, when I had to do my chores very early one day last week, none of the hens wanted to go out. They set up quite a ruckus when I started scattering wood chips.

Gracie waiting for me to wish her a good morning