Farm & Garden
Tea Lane Farm could soon be home to pick-your-own strawberries or fields of thousands of lilies and zinnias. Finalists for tenant farmer of the historic 18th century farm presented their plans to the Chilmark selectmen this week.
The three finalists — Rusty Gordon and Sarah Crittenden, Krishana Collins and Allen Healy — were interviewed at a joint meeting between the selectmen and Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank town advisory board on Tuesday night.
How do weeds and bugs survive in chilly, dry, wind when the poor plants we love get completely beat up? It’s a mystery to me. No matter how well I care for a plant it never is as hardy as the weed next to it. This is in spite of hoeing, pulling, and/or cutting the unwanted growth. I must admit I came very close to losing any good humor this week because of the need for endless watering in the annoying, at best, wind. This is no simple twist of a faucet. We’re talking turning on a noisy generator and running it continuously for fuel.
It finally happened. The repercussions of an extremely mild winter are showing themselves. I just finished a two week run with antibiotics. I actually pulled seven (count ‘em) ticks off myself in one day. I find them everyday in troublesome numbers. I seem to pick up most of them in my vegetable garden. I’ve whined about my vole problem endlessly and now I believe the little critters are the source of the huge tick population. Honestly, there are times when nature can be so annoying. I’ve resorted to rolls of scotch tape everywhere to trap the ticks after removing them from myself and the animals. I’m half tempted to Frontline myself.
My family has learned how to express love through food. Maybe a little too heavily on the food side, and we are still learning to express ourselves emotionally, which can lead to a miscommunication or two. Just this morning my father greeted me with oysters while he shucked them with a pocketknife. Almost every time he comes by the farm he has something for me in a five-gallon bucket or one of those orange fish baskets he finds on the beach.
I wonder if the written word can do justice to the following? In light of the recent tornado outbreaks in the Midwest this past week, this event is relatively benign. Last Friday a mini-wind situation must have taken place in my big vegetable garden. I have a large heavy-plastic igloo-type shelter that I use in the fall to house pigs. It is quite large — perhaps six feet long, four feet tall and three feet wide. It will comfortably sleep three 200-pound pigs. I use it to store hoses, rolls of weed mat and shovels over the winter.
My perennial beds are in serious disrepair. I did manage to get them cut back of last season’s debris. However they haven’t seen a cultivator or any fertilizer in a few years, forget about any weeding taking place. The mugwort has run rampant. For those of you unfamiliar with this weedy artemisia, it is in one form the herb moxa used in acupuncture. It has healing properties when burned on a patient. I had it work one time when the practitioner burned a cyst from the top of my hand. It was quite remarkable, actually.