Farm Friday, October 13th, 2023
Planting garlic and caring for a baby chick
The fall season continues without a significant frost. This is the latest I can remember harvesting basil. Climate change makes the weather both unpredictable and generally warmer. I am beginning to see that the catastrophes that people expect to come from climate change will happen during my lifetime — near future not far future. What will I do? What will we do? What are we doing?
This week I have been seeing the news from Israel and Palestine and my heart hurts for everyone who has lost loved ones in this ongoing conflict. I see you.
This is the backdrop for a season that feels otherwise normal. We still have to harvest the pumpkins and host all the classes of elementary-aged children. We still pick the kale and Brussels Sprouts and press the cider. We still say goodbye to the sandhill cranes as they migrate south, and we watch for deer as we drive.
And we still have to plant the garlic.
Garlic goes in every year before the ground freezes. It is a marker of the passage of the season. When the garlic is in, we can tick one more thing off the “ready for winter” box. We still need to unhook and put away the garden hoses. We still need to bring in the popcorn to dry in the greenhouse. We still need to pack and sell the harvest baskets. But, as of yesterday, the garlic is in.
We planted over 4,000 cloves of garlic with a class of students. They cracked the heads open and separated the cloves and then we planted it all by pushing it into the freshly tilled soil at 6-inch intervals. I’m sore today.
This week one of the baby chicks was not doing well. My partner brought the chick into our house and fed her and warmed her up and gave her water from a dropper. The chick seemed to perk up, and after she made it through the night, we took her with us on the road trip to visit our chiropractor, an hour away. She was the darling of the office and Pippa did well with her too.
My partner even named her and showed her off on a zoom meeting. But the third morning, little Dahlia took a turn for the worse and died. It was sad because she had been doing so much better.
In writing news, I have several stories percolating. I have wanted to write about racism in Wisconsin since Laura M. Quainoo commented on my Bayfield essay. She said the obvious — that Bayfield might be nice, but it is unlikely that it would be a welcoming place for her to live. I can’t disagree. Frankly, the whole state of Wisconsin might fit in that category. Why?
I think it has something to do with the way the land was taken from Indigenous folks. We all know that they were forced, cheated, and swindled out of their land. It is one of the two original sins of this nation. In Wisconsin, we white people like to think that God gave us this land because we were good people and we knew how to use the land well. That belief in God blessing us with the land and wealth is a cover for the real story. As a gift from God, we were not going to give it up easily when the Great Migration brought Black folks north looking for opportunities. So we created redlining and racial covenants and sundown laws and pushed freeways through Black neighborhoods. We funded public schools through property taxes and then wondered at disparate outcomes. We treated Black migrants as if they were a hostile invading army, isolating them in poor neighborhoods and denying them access to the wealth that comes from the land that God gave us.
When we feel like we deserve the prosperity and land we get, then we feel like other people who want some of that prosperity and land are trying to get something for nothing. This is why we white folks are so triggered by immigrants.
Those laws are not on the books anymore, but they might as well be, given the racial hostility in most of Wisconsin. I need to do more research before I tie it all together.
