For all of you who have been holding your breath along with me, we can breathe a sigh of relief.  Yes!  The garden is actually producing food!

I know you were all waiting for that good news.

It got off to a rocky start – and I do mean rocky.  We pulled everything from gravel to boulders out of that garden.  Then, whole rows of plants went missing, thanks to a voracious baby bunny that squeezed between the wire squares of the fence.  For as much as he/she ate – I’m surprised it could squeeze back out again.

Some stuff was slow to take off.  A seed tape of lettuce must have sat beneath the surface of almost rock hard dirt for about a month before it started pushing through – now it’s producing more lettuce than we can eat (or want to eat).

The peas have come and gone already – but I’m already planning a fall crop.  The beans are throwing more beans at me than I can keep up with.  I blanch and freeze a colander full almost every night.

The zucchini is starting, and you know if you turn your back on those things, they turn into the size of a baseball bat before you know it.  I’ve been freezing those (and yellow squash), and grating some of the zucchini so that when the snow flies, I can make zucchini bread.  I’m waiting for the acorn squash and patty-pan squash to take off, the tomatoes plants are loaded with green tomatoes, and we’ve picked our first two cucumbers.

While there have been some flops (like the garlic and Swiss Chard), the garden seems to be a success – even the sunflowers are blooming to give their approval.

Yes, we’ll be eating well – well into next year.

We came up with the name of the “No Rhyme or Reason Farm” because it was known as the Reason Farm (the last name of the people who owned the farm for many years), and…because there was no rhyme or reason why we would decide to buy and renovate a farm.  The name seemed to fit.

Until now.

I think we should rename it the “Broken Glass Farm.”  Either someone used the farm for target practice, or the glass fairies fly through at night and sprinkle broken glass around – just for sport.  At first I was always hopeful that the glint of glass meant that I could dig up a whole glass bottle (and I have dug up a few).  More often than not, that glint of glass is just a chip or a shard or a piece – not connected to anything else.  It could be the neck of a bottle, but no matter how deep you dig, you won’t find the rest of the bottle.  It could be a piece of green glass, and if you dig deeper, all you find is clear glass.

There is a lot of it.  I pick it up; it reappears overnight, especially if it has rained during the night.  It just works its way to the surface and sits there waiting for me to find it.  So I decided to collect every piece of glass I found for one week and save it.  I now have one pound, six ounces of glass chips, shards and pieces.

All this broken glass scattered around, for no rhyme or reason.  I guess the name still fits after all.

The horses have been here for more than a month now.  It’s become part of our daily routine to trudge up the hill in the evening, pat Disa and Pono on the head and give them a carrot or a treat.  Fiona won’t come close enough for us to even touch her, but she will eat a bit of grain from a scoop if we hold it over the fence.  She is just starting to eat out of Chris’ hand now.  If there’s a fence between us and her – she’s okay with us.  Disa and Pono have no such issues.

But eating – whether its carrots, a treat or a pasture full of grass – has other consequences.  Lots of consequences.

Chris spent a recent afternoon loading up the cart on the back of his John Deere with those consequences – twice.  Two carts full!  And dumping it all into a manure pile where it can rot and compost and eventually get re-loaded into the cart in a couple of years to till into my garden.  And grow carrots — that I can feed to the horses…  And so it goes.