Onions

Apples and lunch are important around here.  A typical lunch goes like this: bread, mayo, tomato, lettuce, mustard, relish, and a lunch meat appear on the table alongside the cloth napkins, plates, and knives.  My cloth napkin is the red one.  I've been dabbing the corners of my mouth with it since Saturday.  When the sandwiches are gone, Stan puts an apple on a white plate and pushes the apple across the table at me.  Two seconds ago Stan popped out the back door, said "how's the work?"  I said, "I'm telling the world that you force me to eat an apple every day."  After lunch today we boxed up 70 lbs. of onions and 20 lbs. of shallots for the Santa Fe co-op.  Then we dragged an enormous, 200 lb. clump of cattails out of the septic pond, i.e. the pond that processes the home's waste water.  With the pitchfork, I turned part of the clump with a little too much gusto and we both got showered with some unpleasant sludge.   Here's the onion bin.  Rather, one of them.

Today's hard work, however, was not boxing up onions or working on the septic pond; it was yanking out about 20 small elm trees with a big, toothy clamp, a heavy-duty chain, and Stan's Japanese tractor.  The elms had inveigled themselves into a wire fence, and it became a situation that was no longer tenable.  I took some video of the process, and I will post that tomorrow or the next day.  Until then, here's the Japanese tractor.  If you're into tractor brands, it's a Kubota.