Blank Slate

Winter drives me mad.  When I was a little kid and would get in a huff about things, my father would call me stomp-and-snort.  One of the uglier personas I sometimes still like to don, much to Stuart's chagrin.  Must we really have three children in the house, Alice?  Petulance can unfortunately be a lifelong trait.  Stomp-and-snort seems particularly prone to come out during the short, dark days of winter where there is nowhere to turn but inward and I have to grope around in the darkness of myself.  And trust me, dark groping can be as perverted as it sounds!

But seriously, it has been a challenging winter for us.  Our greenhouse heater went out during one of the first arctic blasts we had and we lost a couple rounds of lilies and several rounds of transplants.  Then yesterday we lost our new hoophouse which we received the majority of funding for through the NRCS.  Stuart and our crew put so much time into the construction of that house.  We had just finished ditching and preparing a french drain for it and we were slated to have it all planted by late March.  Then I went into the greenhouse yesterday and noticed leaf burn on the last round of lilies we had planted, which means (i'm guessing) our heater is emitting too much ethylene or some other gas that would do this.  Sometimes I would like nothing more than to create a blank slate and start over, perhaps even in another field of work.  But we sit and ask ourselves what we would rather be doing and we have trouble coming up with anything.  So farming it is, despite the heartbreak, despite the loss, despite the failure.  I hope we have some big wins this year as well.