Orange Thumb

10/18/98
The celery has been pulled from their milk carton 
blanchers, roots chopped off and thrown to the cows 
who stood watching and begging at the fence-line, 
the stalks and leaves cleaned of fallen maple leaves 
and spider webs, and tossed into a wash tub. I am 
now waiting for Gin to finish with the laundry so I 
can use the water to wash the dehydrator and then 
rinse the celery before drying it.

10/25/98
Gin removed the last two cookie trays of dried celery 
from the oven this morning. I told her we had two 
gallon jars filled and didn’t have any more room for 
those batches. She said she’d give them to her mother 
and bagged them up. 

I went to the garden and dug the rest of the potatoes 
and onions. Together they filled our wash tub. I’ll 
start drying the onions tonight. My neighbor said I 
could have a truckload of sand he had leftover from a 
project, I’m going to put it on the onion bed for next 
year’s carrot patch. I pulled two carrots for a pork 
roast that Gin needed the oven for, I’d like to pull the 
rest of them before dark.

Well, the carrots didn’t get dug. But the two beds 
that I’d forked after harvesting did get a half-ton of 
sand spread on top. I will cover this sheet with a 
blanket of compost before the final comforter of 
snow gets laid on top. Two cookie trays of onion tops 
went into the oven tonight. I clipped them with a pair 
of shears. The bulbs will get chopped and put into the 
dehydrator tomorrow.

11/15/98
It has been almost a month since I wrote the notes 
above. I just pulled the carrots! Other chores and 
woodworking jobs kept me from the garden until last 
week. The small patch of carrots, planted in a tractor 
tire design, filled two five gallon buckets. I could tell 
where I had thinned the rows by the length and 
diameter of the carrots. Unthinned bunches were 
small with at least one of every handfull bug-eaten or 
diseased. Where I had given them room to grow the 
carrots stretched right down to China and some 
reached an inch and a half around. The bunnies will 
love the tops and the partially eaten ones tonight. I 
can now finish spreading the compost on that half of 
the garden. After washing and snipping off the tops, 
we sliced five gallons of carrots up. Three quarts 
went into the freezer and the rest were dehydrated, 
another two quarts from the first load, the next batch 
should give the same. I just unloaded the first batch 
and will fill the dehydrator again just as soon as I 
finish writng this...

11/18/98
Visiters to our homestead say I have a green thumb. 
They don't know it but I also have colorful fingers. 
Today they are orange from slicing ten gallons of
carrots. In June my fingers were red from picking
strawberries, July's berry picking gave me blue hands and tongue.