After the Rain

It was a beautiful morning after a gentle night of rain. The plants are thankful. Now the sun is out, and the wind is kicking up making it one of those glorious days that punctuate winter.

Here's the permaculture tomato patch-in-waiting, snaking its way between the path and fence line. As you may recall, last year we used Fukuoka's no-till method of planting directly into the prairie at this location. It was a bad year locally for tomatoes because of the intense spring heat, so it's hard to judge the outcome and too soon to give up the idea.

After the tomatoes came down we began composting our chicken manure in situ, and this fall I planted hairy vetch directly into the mounds. Supposedly you can plant tomatoes directly into the vetch in spring while it's working to fix the nitrogen in the soil. The vetches are doing well. My husband has decided that Hairy Vetch sounds like a big band leader, and probably has a brother named Dicky Vetch.

I wonder, do others of you that live on the farm come up with your own farm cosmology and language? The other night my husband mumbled "thank you" and what I heard was "oink". It is not unlikely in the future we will use "oink" in lieu of this to add levity to the chores.

So to all my blog readers, oink!