gardening: growing mangels

We found this in our drafts folder. Although it is obviously a spring post, the principle applies always: farmers are at the mercy of the weather. So are non-farmers, only they seldom know it.

Mr. Wendell Berry notes in his essay The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal World that, I paraphrase, agricultural production is perennially subject to vagaries unknown to industry. Things like weather.

Our third planting of mangels went in yesterday. Why three plantings? The first planting was watered into the ground by torrential rains that packed our clay soil tight, followed by hot, dry, sunny weather that turned it into cement. Any seeds that germinated were trapped under that hard surface. The second planting was more fortunate than the first, but now the seedlings are competing with weed seedlings. Not only that, but the first seeds planted were spread out when we tilled for the second planting, and now are popping up here and there, making it almost impossible to determine where the lines of mangels are so we can cultivate between them. So the second planting will have to compete with weeds for an indeterminate period, until I can identify the rows for cultivation.

Now you know why we made a third planting. For this one, we've made shallow but identifiable furrows and planted directly into them. This will help focus rainfall on the seedlings, and also allow us to cultivate for weeds even before the seeds germinate. If any/all of these plantings produce, we'll have lots of pig food for the winter, which is the goal of mangels.

The vagaries of agriculture.