No Time Like the Present

It is with much trepidation, I assure you, that I start this post and the 2013 season with a cliché, but trepidation does not outweigh cheekiness/ennui.

The greenhouse has gone neglected these past few months, but the sun came out today and we’re entering a warm spell, so: No time like the present.

Old trays are stacked and put on their appropriate shelves. Tables are cleared. Garden hoses are coiled. It is just a start, and represents just a dent in the overall mess that is the greenhouse area, but a start is a start, and, as I say: NTLTP.

I start to plan the season, and make lists of what I’ll grow. Hence the cheekiness. This will be our most unadventurous season. This season we will grow only a few select items. Those items are the most reliable and the most       profitable for us. In some ways they are the most boring for us. The season may end up being a farming cliché, and I taunt the Gods with my meta title.

The farm is being reinvented in its most severe way yet. I’ll work off farm full time this year, and perhaps for many years into the future. I’ve come to accept that the farm, in its current model, can not provide me with even a subsistence living. I must reinvent the model or starve. We’re baring down the product list this year. I won’t even attempt to have the farm provide for all me needs. This year I only want it to break even.

This is a hard way to start the season. I’ve been avoiding these decisions for many years now. But now, even with the bright and warm orange orb shining down on me for the first time in weeks, with the catalogs sprouting in the mailbox again every day, with the greenhouse polished, I cannot fool myself into thinking that this year, it’s gonna work.

But my prose doubles back on itself again, for in its state of reduced goals, it will work. It will work for all it has to do to work is be itself – nothing grand at all. I’ll leave it at that. I sat for a moment trying to think of a clever way to close this post. But I won’t try. I feel no need to draw everything in this essay together and then end by once again saying no time like the present.