I was motivated to raise a crop, thus performing the miracle of mechanized gardening called “farming”. Perhaps a tractor would fix the “no time” conundrum that kills my hopes of gardens.
Here’s my logic: In theory, a farmer sits on a tractor several hours in spring, several hours in fall, and a few hours in the middle. You do not need to feed a tractor in a February blizzard. Your tractor won’t wilt in a frost. Raccoons cannot eat your tractor. Tractors won’t dig under the fence and run away. See my point? Given my harried schedule, farming seemed more approachable than gardening.
Repeat after me: “God bless the internal combustion engine.”
That last sentence is all my personal bias. I love machines. That whole angle of driving around on dirt is a real selling point. If I didn’t have a tractor to churn up a field I’d probably wind up doing donuts on the lawn with my truck.
So I would be a “farmer”. My “crop” would be a single monoculture field of something that I could ignore during most of the summer and mechanically manage for planting and harvest en masse. It made as much sense as my other ideas.
More in the next post.
A.C.
Note: If you’re warming up for a rant about industrial farming and GMO corn and chemical fertilizers and how we’re all going to die by next Tuesday because Monsanto is just Skynet with overalls please cut me some slack. Of course a lovingly coddled organic carrot is a wonderful thing but I’m also a big fan of plentiful cheap food. Can’t we all get along? There’s room for us all. Organic lettuce and Fritos both have a place in my heart. (The latter may be clogging it.) Also I happen to be deeply opposed to starvation and Hempster McWholefoods isn’t going to feed us all with her four acre night soil augmented patch of organic arugula. I can live with 500 horsepower tracked diesel monsters chewing across Kansas if I get endless cheap boxes of cereal.