author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

At the farm, I spent my first hour and some-odd there harvesting garlic scapes--the flowering stalk of the garlic bulb. I spent nearly the rest of the my working time there tying up bundles of garlic scapes and hanging them in the barn to dry so that they might eventually be turned into garlic powder. And when we took a break for lunch, we ate eggs scrambled with garlic flowers.

This sort of thing has an effect. I have showered and scrubbed virtuously, but the smell of garlic is still following me around.

I mean, I like the smell of garlic as much as the next garlic-loving person. But the smell of garlic itself is one thing; the smell of a person who smells of garlic is an entire 'nother kettle of aromatherapy.

Today was not a good day to be around me, is what I'm saying. Thankfully, I wasn't around anyone else post-farm other than my husband, and he is very tolerant of a smelly wife. As you can see:

Minutes after the BCB Bombshells vs. South Side Derby Dames bout ends, Fleur de Beast hug-tackles Worldnamer on the bleachers.

Worldnamer: "Good job, sweetie! Congrats! Er... you kinda smell."

Fleur: "I know! I smell like derby! Isn't it glorious?"

Worldnamer: "It's... strong!"

OK. But he didn't seem to mind my sitting behind him for pretty much the entirety of the BCB All Stars vs. DRD Bruising Altitude bout.

In other news, I've been slowly making my way through various Hugo-nominated works so as to cast my ballot. And I'll be honest with you: I don't always finish all the works in the category before I cast my ballot. Like slush readers and bookstore customers, I have a tendency to form an opinion before I read the whole thing, and sometimes that opinion is a form of "I've seen enough. Next?"

This is a subject that's been a titch contentious this season. I'm not going into the whole thing here (it would take too long, and besides, others have gotten there first); I'm just going to point vaguely at the part of the kerfluffle where a small contingent of bigots and bigot-enablers have been challenging "lefties" to honestly evaluate each nominated piece "on its own merits" rather than on assumptions about the authors' politics. Then I'm going to point at what they're holding behind their backs, which is the slate of works they campaigned for getting nominated purely based on those authors' politics.

Which is the long way of saying that, by declining to abstain from a ballot just because I haven't read each work start to finish, I am undoubtedly Doing Hugo Voting Wrong by some people's lights. And if it means enough to them to take up a significant portion of their brain with disapproving of me (and others) for it, that's cool. It's no more my business how they use their brains than it's their business how I use my vote. But I'm not going to change how I use my vote in response to how they use their brains, so.

That said: Here are some things that can make a work a work, shall we say, smell of garlic to my nose long before I've reached the end of the piece.

• Dialect so thick as to transform Character into Caricature, especially a racist and classist caricature.
• Persistently maintaining that thickly-spread stereotype of a dialect despite logical reasons not to, i.e. having a character painfully sound out the words on a page yet flawlessly transliterate those words into dialect as they go.
• Distracting me from the story by committing glaring factual error in the narration.
• Failing, after five chapters, and despite ample opportunity, to introduce any female characters who aren't A. objects of male desire, or B. secretaries.

These are just a few examples taken from what I've read so far. There will be more. There have already been more. These are just the ones that jump immediately to mind.

Lastly, not so much in the "smelling of garlic" as in the "just not getting my vote" category: In-jokes, cute Tuckerizations, scatological humor, and other flavors of funny that destroy my sense of wow. There were laugh-out-loud moments in works that I am voting at the top of my preferential ballot, but they were more ilke human-to-human humor, if that makes any sense. A self-deprecating turn of narrative, dialogue that's heart-warming as well as clever, absurd situations for the characters to navigate, wry observations of human foible that I can relate to--I don't know. Both humor and wow are very subjective senses. I'm sorry. It's not you, it's me.

I suspect I shall continue Doing Hugos Wrong for the foreseeable future, or at least for the better part of the next month. But I shall only smell of garlic until my next shower. I hope.

Ow. Ow, ow-ow-ow ow, and also ow.

My back is sore. My legs are sore. Everything is sore.

It has a lot to do with roller derby, true. But, oddly, not so much to do with playing the actual game. Saturday morning I helped lead the Phase 1 class, in which I apparently attempted to assert my powers of mind control over the new skaters. That is, I spent a lot of time demonstrating a good, low, stable derby stance ("Bend those knees! Torsos upright! Get lower!") not just to be a good role model but also out of an irrational and mostly subconscious conviction that I could actually cause the training skaters to get lower if I just got lower myself. Wouldn't that be nice? For both them and me? As it turns out, I do not have mind control powers. But my thighs and lower back got a great workout.

And then Sunday we started off team practice with a 20 minute session of rotating off-skates fitness stations. This made all of the things hurt, y'all. That means I'm getting stronger, right? I hope?

So that was my weekend. Then Monday happened.

Mondays are farm days! And it's planting time. They're trying to get just as many seedlings into the ground as they can during the "summer solstice plateau," which is to say, the period between the summer solstice and the fourth of July. You can probably imagine the amount of bending/kneeling/squatting involved in working one's way down the row, troweling open the earth to drop seedling plugs in every 7 to 14 inches. But what you're probably not imagining is all the hula hoe and rake work that happens before we get to pick up the trowel. We had to "scratch" the beds, using the hula hoe to break the crust of the dry surface, soften up the soil a bit, and move the soil around to help reinforce the shape of the beds. Then we had to rake the clods off into the furrows. Only then did we get to put the seedlings into the ground.

There is probably a writing metaphor there--something about having to prepare the metaphorical ground before you can plant the seedling ideas and encourage them to grow into stories--but I'm too sore and tired to think about it right now.

Ow.

Today I got to wield the hula hoe for my first time this season. Yay?

*pant* *pant* *wheeze*

The hula hoe invariably goes with hot, sunny weather. It comes out when the weeds pop up and the ground is dry and flaky. For me, it also usually means an aching back and blistered fingers, because I still haven't gotten this right. I must be getting better at it, though, because each year the back aches less and there are fewer blisters.

And fewer unfortunate casualties on the field.

To reiterate: The business end of a hula hoe is a sharp loop of steel that slices just beneath the soil through the roots of weeds both seen and unseen. It lets you deal with weeds faster than if you were picking them by hand. It won't help you with the weeds that are using the wanted crop as a sort of human shield, so to speak, but you can get very close to the line of the crop without missing a beat. If you're clever, that is. And strong. And skilled at maneuvering the tool through the dirt.

There are so many failure modes with this thing. You can be careless at recognizing which plant is the plant you want to keep, and scythe right through friend and foe alike. It's an easy mistake to make if the crop is very young and hard to spot, like just-sprouted onions, shallots, or other alliums. It's also easy if the plant you're trying to keep (burdock) looks, at least from one's standing-up vantage point, remarkably like the weeds you're trying to knock back (lamb's quarter). Then you can be clumsy with the hoe itself and let it slip into the crop line while giving it a particularly vigorous tug--this happens more often than not because I've given it a particularly vigorous tug, possibly because I'm fighting with the tool instead of working with it or because I'm trying to go too deep and I'm meeting too much soil resistance. Or maybe it's because I've just hit a rock.

Or it could be because I'm getting tired and hot and thirsty, and suddenly a five-foot pole with a piece of steel on the end feels terribly heavy, and both my back and my thighs are killing me so there's really no ideal posture left for the job anymore.

Yes, yes. Whine, whine, whine. Actually, today was not so bad. It was murderously hot and sunny, but I was wearing my Full Armor of Sun Protection while hydrating faithfully. And I wasn't at it for more than an hour at a time--an hour before lunch and an hour after. Behold! In the remainder of my day there was knitting, and bicycling, and going out with new friends, and no napping at all! Pretty good considering I didn't sleep well last night and then got up at 6:30. So despite my whining, the physical labor did not in fact kill me for the afternoon.

But even with as many seasons under my belt as I've got, I still get very insecure. I mean, at any moment the hoe could slip and I could kill a significant sample of the crop population! And I know I severed at least one burdock seedling today. Realistically, one is a fairly acceptable margin of error, but it's always sobering when it happens.

Look out, here comes your writing metaphor for the week.

Similarly, despite long experience with writing and revising, I still get scared I'm going to kill the story I'm rewriting. I'll go into the editing process certain that the thing I think needs to go was in fact the story's saving grace, or that in the process of tightening things up I'll remove everything that made the prose live on the page. Even now, I find I don't wholly trust my ear for Story. I don't entirely credit myself with the ability to tell the manuscript's good from bad. If improving a piece requires the fiction-writing equivalent of a sense of pitch, on some level, I'm sure I'm actually tone deaf.

This is very timely, because revising a draft is what I'm going to be doing this week. And I know that even a very clumsy, ham-handed draft has the potential to be killed on the page.

I have to keep reminding myself, "You've been doing this for years. You've sold stories for publication! Give yourself credit for learning a thing or two. If nothing else, give the editors who bought your stories credit for knowing good stuff when they read it." Or even, "Well, regardless, you have to try, because the thing isn't publishable in its current form."

When I start feeling insecure about my ability to wield the hula hoe without causing collateral damage, I don't just put down the tool and run away. What do I do? I guess I slow down. I slow way down. I make shorter strokes and shallower ones, so that I'm more in control of where the sharp end of the tool goes. Sometimes, if I'm not sure I've spotted the crop among the weeds, I do put the tool down--but only for the time it takes me to kneel in the dirt and pull out some bindweed by hand.

There's a parallel for that in writing. Go slower. Take a closer look at particular aspects of the story. Make a bunch of smaller changes rather than one big sweeping one. If my confidence in my "sense of pitch" is low, I can remind myself that I am capable of recognizing a tune sung on key--I can go re-read a favorite book, noting as I do those elements that make it work so well. (Or go re-read a fun but flawed book, noting the blunders and missed opportunities.) When it's someone else's writing that I'm reading, I never lose faith in my ability to tell writing I like from writing I don't like. I can use the act of analyzing others' writing as a sort of jump-start.

At least my editing mistakes are more reversible than my farming ones. There is no CTRL-Z for a severed seedling.

As of June 1, my volunteer shift at McCauley's starts at 7:00 AM. There are all sorts of theoretical good things about that. Getting a goodly chunk of outdoor work done before the morning really heats up, that's one of them. Getting more work in before we break for lunch, that's good too.

Getting me out of bed an hour earlier is probably good? Maybe? In the long run?

Only that's not what happened today. What happened today is, my alarm went off at 6:00. I hit snooze, with the intention of getting up when it went off again at 6:15. Next thing I knew, I was looking at the clock and it said 6:30.

So much for doing Morning Pages before my farm shift.

Anyway, I rolled in about fifteen minutes late, which is about on par for me. It turned out to be no big deal (which is about on par for them). The staff still needed to have a meeting to figure out what their plan of action was. So they handed me a pair of snips and turned me loose on five flats of 200 tulsi basil seedlings each: "Just cut off the flowers and put those aside. We'll dry them for tea." When they weren't quite out of their meeting by the time I was done with that, they traded me a forked digging tool for the snips and sent me over to weed the berm, or, more accurately, the flagstone steps going up the berm. (In this case "berm" means "the slope of the hill that encloses the south side of the pond.")

Eventually the meeting broke up and they went over to the east garden for more weeding. Very particular weeding: I was only to pull up the thistle. They had planned on using hula-hoes to weed pretty much everything, but the ground was too wet for that after yesterday's thunderstorm. A hula-hoe is called that because its business end is a rectangular loop of sharp metal ribbon. It's supposed to slice cleanly through the top couple inches of soil, severing all the tiny weeds from their roots without unduly disturbing the crop bed. But when the soil is wet and clumpy, the crop bed will get disturbed. So we pulled thistles today, perfecting the art of loosening the soil enough to let the single thick root slide right out but not so much as to damage the herbs and flowers.

After I'd tossed enough thistles into the furrow to dry down and die, I worked on perfecting my own art of sitting down in the furrow without sitting on prickles.

I've been volunteering with one particular farmer, Rich, for years now. I started working for him at Abbondanza when their home farm was on Oxford Road. Then, when they had to leave that land, I followed Rich to McCauley's, where he had moved some of his operations. The upshot of this is, there's a lot of basic farm procedure that I know pretty well now. I no longer worry, the way I used to worry, that my very presence there added to everyone's workload--that the hassle of training me on every task outweighed the help of me doing the task. A lot of tasks, I don't need training on anymore. Where I do need training, the training can be brief, given in terms of the concepts I'm already in good command of.

This means that if I arrive in the middle of a staff meeting, they can put me right to work--often on a somewhat overdue side project that it's hard to make time for, day to day--with a minimum of pause for instructions. Hence the tobacco thinning a couple weeks ago, or the harvesting of tulsi basil flowers this morning. And after lunch it was easy for me to jump right back into the thistle-pulling without waiting for others to come along and tell me where to do it. I wasn't entirely sure, but I figured I couldn't go too wrong if I just looked for thistles to pull.

I'm kind of proud and pleased about that, having learned over the years to be useful without fuss. And I'm kind of touched and honored that they trust me with it. I realized today that, because they trust me, I've come to trust myself, too. I don't worry anymore that I'll run the whole crop with some newbie mistake while I'm thinning or transplanting or weeding.

These are good folks to volunteer for. They're patient, laid-back, and calm. I know that they must be under considerable stress, given the constrictions of time and money and materials and weather, but they've never handed that stress on to me. And their easy trust helped relax me out of my high maintenance, insecure beginnings, making it possible for me to acquire confidence along with experience.

So that's just something I've started to realize recently, and I wanted to voice my appreciation.

Monday is farm day, and today was doubly a Monday. (This in contrast to those for whom today, being a federal holiday, was more of a second Sunday.) Today I worked at not one but two farms. I know someone (through roller derby, naturally) who has a special farm project she's hoping to rock out this week with the help of her friends, and my usual Monday schedule put me in her neighborhood in time for a solid afternoon's work.

Things done:

• Finally finished thinning that tray of woodland tobacco seedlings. (Yes, McCauley Family Farms grows tobacco. Four or five varieties, in fact. It's kind of an ongoing experiment. They grow a little of everything.) The dang stuff was coming up like moss. Narrowing them down to three plants per cell was like topiary sculpture in miniature. Well, I guess it was literally topiary sculpture in miniature, given a loose definition of topiary.
• Prepared some trays of wintered-over herbs and decoratives for transplant: feverfew, lovage, sea oats (a kind of grass), thyme, and... something else I forget now. Each wooden tray was set to soak in a tub of fertilizer solution which was strongly redolent of fish. I fear I got a good deal of it on me when I tried to help it along by splashing the liquid up and over the edge of the tray. Then we took the trays out and hacked up the undifferentiated soil-and-root mat into discrete chunks ready for transplant. Which meant more contact with the fishy smelling fertilizer solution. The thyme smelled nice, though.
• Planted the herbs thus prepared and covered their beds with mulch.
• Pounded fence posts into the area that will become my friend's new pig run, the old one having been washed away by September's flood. Lay out the wire panels that will make the actual fence. Also got to meet all the livestock. She raises pigs and rabbits with varying emphasis on livestock shows and meat. I got to meet the cats and dogs too. One of the dogs is a Great Dane who greeted me through the open window of my car before I'd even parked, let alone killed the engine. Great Danes are tall.

I came home with a dozen eggs, freshly laid today, bought at McCauley's, and a three pound frozen rabbit my friend surprised me with after we wrapped up the afternoon's work with the pig run. After a bit of recipe research and a grocery run, the rabbit will probably go in the crock pot. My friend recommends pot pie.

I got home around 4:30 PM and had my usual post-farm self-indulgent extended hot soak in the tub, where I did some writing, did some reading, and did some serious scrubbing. Nevertheless, I'm still catching whiffs of that fishy fertilizer. I can't seem to trace it to anything obvious, like my hair or my fingernails. It's just... lingering. I may be imagining it.

Terribly strained farm-to-writing metaphor of the day: Inspiration comes from the unlikeliest places, some of which aren't pretty. The process of story "composting" and idea "fertilizing" is not always sweet-smelling. You know that quote about having to go into the dark places? Sometimes you have to go into the stinky places, too.

So... there ya go.

Today's farm work involved pitchforks.

Pitchforks are tall and rather heavy. They are slightly unwieldy if you're not used to them and/or if one of your wrists is going through a phase of is-it-or-is-it-not-sprained.

Pitchforks are also very sharp at the end that's worryingly close to your toes. Pitchforks mean we are not farming barefoot today.

Similar to last time, we were working with a bed to be planted. But last time we were working the earth in preparation for the tractor to come through. This time, we were post-tractor but pre-planting. So it was less about going deep to partially break things up and more about staying shallow and breaking things up very thoroughly.

The farmer came by and corrected our technique. "It doesn't need to be that deep. Just use the fork, see? Use the fork." He jabbed half the fork's length into the earth at a 45-degree angle, twisted it a little, and then stabbed a few more times until there were no big clumps left. Then he handed the fork back to me. I swiftly came to the conclusion that the farmer has a back of iron and arms of steel. Just use the fork. Ha.

But, you know, if I have to drive the fork with my foot because I have insufficient upper body strength to imitate the farmer precisely, well, that just means my foot is never under the tines when I take a stab at things. This is a feature. However, that twisting motion? That is why my left wrist is having sprained-type thoughts now. Ow.

Sometimes it's best to find your own way to do things. As long as you arrive at the desired goal, hey, that's cool, right?

That's about all I've got for a farm-to-writing metaphor today. That, and I guess also reiterating how very satisfying it is to look back on the results of finished work. We started at the east end of the bed; when we reached the west end and looked along its length and saw how lush and soft and ready for planting that bed looked, we felt entirely justified in heading up to the office for lunch.

I've heard people speak disparagingly of writers who are happier with "having written" than with "writing." And I think such people are unmitigated puritans. Because, oddly enough, I'm also happier with "having turned a bed by hand with a pitchfork" than I am with "turning a bed by hand with a pitchfork." It's this weird thing about work--it's work, isn't it? It's worth doing, sure, and when the work is writing it includes unexpected moments of delight, certainly, and I don't tend to sprain my wrist doing it. But there's no denying that it's so much more uncomplicatedly satisfying to look back on a finished work and say, "I did that."

You might think a freakish May snow storm would preclude much farm work. This is not the case. We just moved the farm work inside. Seedling thinning continued from last week, only the thinning party (or thinning bee, if you will) took place inside the greenhouse, where it was hot enough to make me regret my extra layers of clothing.

Plants I worked with today: Lettuce, fennel, marjoram, sage, several varieties of tobacco, and, very briefly, more peppers.

My favorite of the above was the fennel. Some people hate all things licorice-flavored; I love them. Fennel, anise, ouzo, absinthe, black jelly beans and Jujyfruits, Good & Plenty, Allsorts, salted, even Twizzlers if you must. Thinning fennel was like kicking back with a freshly opened bag of Haribo licorice wheels. Every third or fourth stalk that I snipped went into my mouth.

Eventually, later on this summer, the fennel will be all grown up and harvested and ready to eat. At that time, my favorite thing is to quarter the stalks, salt them and pepper them, sautee them in butter, and coat them in Parmesan cheese. Goes well with potatoes or a really flavorful rice.

I did not come home and nap. I came home and got stuff done. I did all my household accounting chores as well as a few more tasks that have been languishing. I even popped the bearings out of my outdoor wheels and cleaned them. I should have done that Saturday evening immediately after all that skate-dancing around at the New Brew Fest and, more to the point, walking through wet grass between the dance floor and the Boulder County Bombers promotional booth. Hopefully the three-day wait won't result in noticeable rust spots.

And now, having been virtuously productive all afternoon, I'm just hanging out at home having a relaxing evening. I have a lot of work to do tomorrow, writing-wise, but I'll worry about that when tomorrow gets here.

I'm just back this evening from taking my monthly turn as part of a dynamic training duo on the roller derby track. Have I mentioned that leading Phase 1 really wears me out? In a good way, that is. I can't not do the exercises along with the class; that feels like standing around while other people are working. So I get to practice the basics while I mentally dissect them in order to better explain and demonstrate them.

Additionally, tonight's Phase 1 class was Day 1 for the latest group of new recruits. A huge, fantastic, wildly enthusiastic group of new recruits (two of whom I happen to have been in writing groups with before! Small world). So I am not only physically worn out, but also emotionally worn out (again, in a good way--so many new recruits! So happy! So much energy... that the crash will be spectacular). Mentally, too, because we had to take care of a bunch of intake procedures and administrative tasks that started when the first skater arrived and continued well after we'd all left the track. It was like coming home from one of the more successful New Recruit Nights last year while I still headed up the Recruiting Committee. Very exciting! But also very exhausting.

So it was a good thing that today's farm work wasn't particularly exhausting. It's that happy time of year when the seedings have sprouted. It's like magic! Healthy and joyful green sprouts shooting up in rows of abundance from those trays of dirt we prepped and planted several weeks ago. I wish I'd remembered to take photos! Photos were taken, though--I think they may show up on this Facebook page soon.

Now, the thing to do when the seedlings are at this stage in their development--about an inch or two tall, just getting their first true leaves--is to thin them down to a single plant per tray cell. So that's what we did all day. We stood around a table set up next to the greenhouse, wielded very sharp needle-nosed clippers, and snipped away all but the single most vibrant sprouts in each cell. The plants I helped with today were chard (rainbow, rhubarb, and yellow) and peppers (I forget the varieties; possibly criollo was one of them).

Overthinking the process is always a danger. But it's a logical temptation. After all, you're deciding which plant lives and which plants die! You have to get this right. Perfectly logical, except for one thing: with few exceptions, almost any healthy plant is the "right" plant.

Which isn't to say that there's no decision-making process. You want to select for the plant with the thickest, straightest, healthiest stem. That's your ideal. In the case of a tie-breaker, you select for the plant with the lushest, biggest leaves. If that's a stumper, too, you select for the plant closest to the center of the cell.

But as long as there's one healthy plant per cell when you're done (at least, one healthy plant per cell that wasn't empty in the first place), you haven't done wrong. So the pressure's off.

So instead of overthinking it, you get into a rhythm. You glance at the miniature forest under consideration, you decide without too much angst which little tree you want to keep, and you snip the rest. Or if there are too many to choose between at first (some of the chard had eight to ten plants per cell!), then you snip one or two that obviously don't make the cut. Then you consider the plants that remain.

After a while you're making your decisions very quickly. Your eye has adjusted to this mental yardstick. And your confidence has increased such that you know you're not going to accidentally cut them all, or cut the only healthy plant so that you're left with a stunted and badly rooted yellowing thing. You know that you're going to make an acceptable decision. So you stop worrying and you just get on with it.

This was one of the most helpful things I took away from my trip partway through John Vorhaus's Creativity Rules: A Writer's Workbook. He identified for me a prevalent cause of writer's block: Fear of unlimited choice. That's what makes the blank page so intimidating. You can put anything on it. The possibilities are endless! How can you possibly choose the right one?

Well, when it comes right down to it, any choice is the right one. That's because your choice isn't between a single right idea and an infinity of wrong ones. It's between leaving the page blank or filling it with words. The right choice is always to fill the blank page with words. So don't stress, don't overthink it--just start writing.

Besides, paper is virtually unlimited, digital paper doubly so. All those ideas you didn't choose this time, they'll be there for you to play with another time.

(The other thing I took from the Vorhaus is the idea that any words are the right words, because any time you write, you're practicing your craft. Practice today makes you a better writer tomorrow. Every tomorrow's goal is to be a better writer than the writer you are today. Thus the right choice is to write.)

So there's your farm-to-writing metaphor of the day: Don't overthink things and angst over decisions in your craft. Trust yourself. The writing trusts you, so you should too.

I had an argument with my alarm clock this morning that resulted in my arriving at the farm a half hour or so late. Basically, my alarm clock argued that I had previously expressed an intention to get up at 6:00 AM, and would I please do it now? And I argued that no, there couldn't possibly be a reason for me to be up at six, shut up. To which my alarm clock said, Fine, shutting up now, but you're gonna be sorry. And indeed, when John's alarm clock went off at eight, I was very sorry.

By the time I got to the farm, I could see the Monday team hard at work in the "spring garden," the terraced beds on the east side of the property. So I parked the car thereabouts, grabbed my work gloves, and jumped in.

First off, we were mulching a bed of recently transplanted herbs, mostly thyme. Mulch consisted of broken up hay or straw (I can't always tell the difference once it's baled) to be scattered plentifully over the beds, whilst clearing out a little scoop around each tiny herb start. The next-door bed of hyssop served as our model. Not to mention the next-door-the-other-side bed of garlic, tops already shooting up to a foot or more tall.

Secondly, we began preparing a new bed for planting. It was in a state of nature: not yet tilled, beginning to green over with bindweed and other noxious customers. Now, McCauley Family Farm is an organic farm. Herbicides are not on the menu. Weeds are managed by hand or not at all. Today, we managed with pitchforks and patience.

We sank those forks just as deep as they would go--what I lack in upper body strength I make up in body weight and gravity, i.e. jumping up and down on the pitchfork--then levered the forks back and forth to break up the earth and expose the roots of each individual bindweed plant. If the root was stuck, sometimes a bit more fork-wiggling loosened them up enough to slip out whole. Sometimes we just had to break them off a few inches down. Thus we traversed the crop bed, covering one pitchfork's worth of ground at a time.

My instinct was to lift the fork entirely, turning the wodge of earth over. But this wasn't what we wanted. For one thing, we were told, this would expose the beneficial microbes and fungi to too much oxygen all at once, activating them to start eating up all the nutrients before the soon-to-be-planted crops could have a chance. For another and more immediate thing, lifting and turning the earth risks burying the very weeds we were trying to expose. So patience, once again, was the order of the day.

Now of course I'm going to be trying to find a metaphor for writing in all of this. That's what I do. Also, this is a blog about writing. And farm work is especially rife with metaphors for writing. Here's a few I'll be chewing on this week:

• Mulching: Nurture ideas and works-in-progress by pursuing research and activities related to the idea or work-in-progress. I might do some remedial reading on Ragnarok and ash trees and historic worst winters, for instance. This builds a crop bed culture full of nutrients and moisture, so to speak. But it's important to keep the work-in-progress in sight; it's too easy to let these mulching activities smother it in a thick covering of procrastination.

• Weeding: Oh, I don't know--something about examining those details implied by the story idea and patiently interrogating them until the full length of their roots is exposed? Something about maybe not scaring them away or destroying them by going after them with too much brute force? (What does that even mean?)

Sometimes my writing metaphors are really strained. What the hell. They might prove useful. Let's wait and see.