plant me some potatoes, please.

you want fries with that?  waffle, home fries, or tater tots?  it’s not just school children and prisoners that get fed a daily dose of fried potatoes, it’s almost everyone.  some massive number of menus across this nation--somewhere near eighty five percent of all menus!—feature the golden brown starchy classic.  don’t get me wrong, fries are delicious.  my point, however, is about potatoes. 

you know how many potatoes that is?  cause i just got my first small taste of what that answer might be.  this week we planted a field that was just over two acres in size to potatoes—half Yukon, half red.  that’s seven rows, three hundred feet long each.  that’s two hundred pounds of potato cuttings which will yield approximately one thousand pounds of new potatoes.  if these numbers aren’t sounding large to you, you’ve never planted potatoes. 

praise gaia, jah, the holy spirit, and the lord almighty that we had some people power out on the farm to get this job done.  our internal community—a few restaurant owners, a few farmers, and a few eager hands—all came together to crush it out in “no time”.

we concluded the evening with our first monthly session of what we call farmthought.  each month an essay or chapter is selected for reading, and we gather around good food and cold beer to discuss.  farming is much more than hard labor.  it’s hard thinking, hard decision making, hard planning, and hard emotions.  it’s a hard way of life, and we’re gettin’ it done as a community—a team, a coop, a group, or what have you.  with able bodies, and even more able minds, it’s amazing what you can see get done.