I had a forty by forty foot garden all those years I farmed.  It started out smaller, of course.  It was south of my house, situated between the house and our white wooden machine shed. Beyond that building was our red pole building, a newer structure we had built.  We stored our tractors in that white shed, and the workbench was in that shed.  Barn swallows and pigeons shit on the tractors so much we had to cover the seats after getting up.  We used the same three burlap bags the whole time we farmed.  Finally we put up barriers to prevent the birds from nesting in there.

I could look out the south window in my kitchen and see up the hill to the back forty pastures and watch the dairy cattle graze.  In the morning I would watch out that window for Dave to leave the red pole building that housed our young stock and head to the barn, swinging empty buckets and know just about when he’d be in for breakfast.

The garden soil is very thin and full of rocks and bedrock is exposed in my yard, but not the in garden.  That was a plus.  I could spend hours roto tilling after Dave had run the disc over it in the spring.  We’d spread old crusty manure over it and then I would work it into the dirt, using shovels and a rake.  A disc is a farmer’s field tool, like a plow, but doesn’t go as deep.  The plow brings up big rocks, sometimes as large as small boulders, and we wanted to avoid that.  We used the disc to break up sod in an old hay field, and Dave could spend a day driving the tractor back and forth, crisscrossing that field and still the grass would grow. So finally we did buy a plow and probably used it three times: the only three times we needed to convert a hay field into a cornfield. And sometimes we would use a grass and weed killer.

The soil here in our area is littered with rocks left by the glaciers.  The soil was scraped off the earth, leaving exposed bedrock and cracks in the bedrock sometimes deep enough to reach the ground water.  This is not friendly farmland.  It’s great for orchards and there are several left from the old days.  Plant a cherry tree or apple tree and you don’t have to work that land for thirty years, which is easier than crop or dairy farming.  But what really happened is that most farms raised many kinds of crops.  Cherry, apple, and hay combined with dairy and maybe pigs or chickens provided a many layered income stream.  If one crop failed, all was not lost.  The farm wife usually had a job off the farm, and sometimes the farmer himself drove truck or school bus.  It was almost impossible to survive on farming alone.  I too had side jobs throughout the years we farmed.

Each spring we would wait until the soil was dry enough and then Dave would disc the fields to ready them for planting.  And a few times he would get anxious and go out early and get the tractor stuck in the mud.  One of our fields was next to a swamp; they call them wetlands now.  But they are really swamps.  In fact many of our fields lay next to the swamp around Peil Creek, which fed Kangaroo Lake.  They were hay-fields for just that reason.  Too wet to work in the spring. We learned the hard way.

One spring day after lunch, Dave went out with the large tractor, the Ford 5000, to pull the disc just lightly through the field, get a jump on the fieldwork.  He was excited to get out there.  Later he walked home from the field, his face dark and a cloud of anger following him. Stuck!  He needed me to follow him in the truck while he drove the smaller tractor and we would hitch the thick chains to the tractor and walk that baby out.  That’s what he kept saying.  That baby will just walk out of the mud.

So I dressed the kids and packed some apples and crackers and drove to the gray log cabin field, the name we had given it cause it was next to a gray log cabin.  It was a summer cabin, so no one was around most of the time, and no witnesses to our drama.

When we got there, I couldn’t believe that it would walk out of the mud.  The tires, close to five feet high were two thirds buried in the mud and the hole was full of water.  But, I didn’t know anything, as I was reminded again, and since I really didn’t, my feelings weren’t bruised. I trusted him, of course.  He backed the tractor and attached the chain to the frames.  This chain was thick, industrial, or rather, agricultural.  Each chain-link was about 3 or 4 inches long and heavy.  I waited until he had it all set.

Then he turned on the bigger tractor, explained how I should drive it out, explained how he would creep forward until the chain was taut and then on his signal we would both go in low gear and increase the rpms and give’er.  These tractors had a low and a high gear, with four forward gears in each one, so that we had a total of 8 forward gears.  Then he mentioned that the front end of the tractor I was driving might rise in the air, like a horse rearing up, and not to be alarmed.  I, of course, told him I would be fine.
And so the plan unfolded and all went as he said it would.  The tractors were roaring, the kids were hanging out of the truck window, watching and cheering us on, the sun was out, the breeze was chilly but the spring air smelled great and birds were everywhere.  I felt so at ease, sure of myself.  This tractor would walk out of the mud and we would all go on, happy.

And then, suddenly, the front wheels of my tractor popped up in the air.  Not inches, but feet.  Almost 4 feet in the air.  It happened so fast that I couldn’t shut the engine down fast enough.  I was shaking, terrified, and not expecting to see Dave  launch himself off the smaller tractor, screaming at me, waving his arms.  For a minute I actually thought he had been as worried as I about the tractor flipping over and pining me underneath.  As he got closer, I saw the look on his face, heard his words, and realized my mistake.  I was an idiot, and a suburban lazy person who didn’t know the meaning of work and couldn’t ever understand farming like he did, he told me.  But then, he wasn’t on that tractor.

So we didn’t get the tractor out of the mud that afternoon.  The next day he asked a neighbor to come and help him.  And of course, that was what he didn’t want to do.  Ask for help.  Show the neighbors he didn’t know how to farm.  His pride hung in the balance.  I learned years later that we should never have tried that stunt.  Hs got stuck only one other time, and this time it was worse.  He had learned some tricks by then, so getting that tractor out was easier.

Getting the fields and garden ready for planting

After all that disc-ing was done, he and I and our small children would go out to a field with five gallon buckets loaded into an old manure spreader pulled by the small antique Ford 9N tractor.   Dave would park it in the middle of the field and we would spread out. The weather was usually cold and damp.  We’d wear our heavy cloth gloves, but not the leather ones.  Once leather gets wet and dries, they are never the same.  They were thick golden yellow gloves.  They reminded me of thick felt.  These could keep our hands warm whether they were dry or warm.  And protect our hands from the rough surfaces of the rocks.  There were so many rocks that we had to make a size distinction, anything smaller than two inches wide stayed in the field.

These were not smooth beach rocks, but rocks from the coral reef that Door County was, so many millenniums ago, and had sharp, rough surfaces and edges.  The frost would heave rocks up each spring and then the disc would find more.  We had to handpick these rocks before Dave could plant the oats or corn seed.  The planter wouldn’t plant well, or break, if we did a shoddy sloppy job. I think hate is too soft a word for how I felt about that job.

There was a story told about rock picking in our neighborhood.   A single farmer bought a mechanical rock picker, which worked pretty well.  Then he got married and sold it.  It wasn’t funny to me.

Our two children, Vanya and Tim, were grand rock pickers.  They could fill a five-gallon bucket faster than Dave or I could carry it to the spreader, unload it and carry it back.  One spring we hired someone to help us with spring fieldwork and all he did was complain about the demeaning physical labor we had expected him to do, all the while those two kids out picked him.  We let him go soon after.

So many rocks were picked by so many farmers’ years before us that those rock fences enclose the fields and pastures.  Some of these fences are built carefully and meant to last.  Others, like the ones around our neighborhood, were just created by farmers dumping bucket after bucket of rocks in a row until there was a rock fence.  Sometimes we would find a piece of granite, dropped by the glacier as it receded, a gift from a far off time and place.

The first spring we farmed, Dave picked rocks alone.  Vanya was too small and it was too cold for her to be out for long, so I stayed in the house.  I felt guilty but couldn’t figure out how to pick rocks with a toddler.  Later years I had the older children to watch the younger one and many times they stayed in the bed of our cream colored pickup, playing, and climbing in and around the truck.  I always brought along snacks. It was like a big metal portable playpen.  Then, when they were bigger we allowed them to work.

After Dave was done with disc-ing the fields, he would pull into the yard and bring the tractor near my garden.  The first time he thought of doing this, I agreed with him.  I thought it would ease the soil preparation and give me a break.  But the big tires spinning and turning on the soft wet soil compacted it and it would soon harden before I got could get into the garden to till it.  Then my job was harder.  The large garden seemed to shrink with the tractor in it.

There was a permanent rhubarb bed on the west side and the asparagus was in the northwest corner.  Each year he would forget about the rhubarb and drive right over that with the disc and cut and spread the roots around, so each year the rhubarb bed grew.  Not so with the asparagus.  Then, the tall grass choked it and the disc-ing killed much of the new growth.  So the bed was disappointing each spring.  After the first year I would race outside waving my hands, perhaps a dishtowel in one, yelling as loud as I could to get his attention.  The blue Ford 4600 tractor would be in a lower gear but the rpm’s revved up and I almost had to run and stand in front of him to stop him.

This was one of those times when he thought I was nuts.  Not because I stood in front of him, but because I disagreed with him.  It was good enough for his mother, all farmers do it this way, why don’t I just plant my sweet corn with the field corn and so on, he told me.  And along with that came the threat that he wouldn’t help me in the garden then, if I had to be stubborn.  Then he would pull the disc through anyway, cutting the rhubarb again.  Right after I reminded him of the patch.  Each year we did this.  To this day, though, the rhubarb patch flourishes and we harvest huge stalks, some up to two feet long.

The thin soil in the garden needed lots of manure and rock picking.  I used the rocks I picked each spring as markers, like little pyramids, at the end of each row.  These would then be scattered by the disc in the spring, so I would be picking up old and new rocks.  After a few years I learned to pick only the ones in the row I was sprinkling seeds, another lazy move by me, I found out, when I visited other farmer’s wives and saw their gardens.  I wondered when they had the time to make them so neat.  Dave did too. And pointed the neat yards out to me as we would drive someplace.

He also wondered why I couldn’t mow the lawn and keep the yard looking nice.  And keep the house clean and the kids clean and him fed and do chores twice a day and wash the bulk tank every other day.  I wondered too.  I thought I was already working hard enough, but apparently I needed to sit in on a scheduling meeting with the farm wives and find out their secrets.  That never happened, either.  No one shared any secrets with me and I’m not so sure there were any.

But I loved the garden and I loved the cattle and I loathed haying. I should say I loathed unloading the bales of hay onto the hay elevator.  The hay stems poked and scratched my arms, the dust got in my eyes and I itched like mad.  I liked raking and baling hay, just not unloading it.  The sight of birds swooping and swirling above us while I’d rake the hay into straight puffy windrows would distract me sometimes.  They were free and watching them, I felt freer then.  The terns from the lake shore would fly in because somehow they knew we were baling that day and there would be mice and bugs staying cool under those windrows that they could catch when exposed.   Snakes would be sleeping under them, too, something Dave was certain would one day give him a heart attack.  Sometimes the baler would scope up a snoozing snake and cut it in half and its tail would be writhing away and Dave would reach into the baler chute and there it would be, in his face almost, freaking him out.  He’d dropped more than one bale, hand to his chest, white faced, stock-still.  I had to watch him carefully so I could stop the tractor slowly but fast enough to rescue him

I sometimes drove the tractor with a baby in a backpack on my back and our dog in my lap, resting up between mice chasing and tire chasing, with the baling machine hooked up to the power take off and the baler was hitched to a hayrack.  When the kids were older they hung out with Dad on the rack and sat on a bale to get out of the way.  Soon, bales were stacked four deep, sometimes five and then Dave would toss them up there like they were pillows, and where they rode until he filled the rack.

The sun pounding down on me, the heat as hot as an oven from the tractor engine and the diesel exhaust filling my lungs and eyes could make me sick. I would sit at an angle so I could watch where I was going, keep an eye on the tractor and the baler and him and the kids and the dog. I can still hear the tractor roaring.  We’d have it on high rpms but a low gear to bale the hay.  Sometimes it was the sound that made me sick more than the heat and exhaust. At the end of a long day baling hay I sometimes had to sit in the shower and let the cold water bring me back from the brink of I don’t know what.  Then I would make dinner before doing chores.

I planted corn, beans, peas, carrots, spinach, Swiss chard, potatoes (once), zucchini, winter squashes, onions, garlic (once) herbs, eggplant (once) cucumbers for eating and cucumbers for pickling, beets (once), cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, lettuces, tomatoes.  One summer I planted okra, another I tried kohlrabi, another I harvested so much basil and made so much pesto I was mailing it to people.  I delivered zucchinis under the cover of darkness and then, began baking zucchini bread and sold it to restaurants, once.  I planted three kinds of beans and three kinds of peas and two kinds of tomatoes.

The summer was full of fresh produce all day and processing it all night.  I learned when to discover when the corn was ready before the raccoons did.  I got good at pickle and sauerkraut making.  I made chokecherry preserves and crab apple jelly, once. The kids and I picked apples from the apple trees in the lot the heifers were in.  We made applesauce and apple butter and apple jelly and apple pies.  They were the best apple pickers because they were young and light and could climb into those old trees, remnants of an old orchard on an old farm.

Chapter Eight