Raised Beds

Where's my christmas truce?

When I've heard about World War I, more often than not I've heard about the trench warfare technique (A very efficient soldier massacring type of warfare where there were hundreds of miles of trenches with an average of 1 soldier every 4 inches. 300,000 died in the battle of Verdun with no change in either party's position). This has become such an ubiquitous part of not only institutional but pop culture education that its dynamics need not  explanation but - Two opposing sides would face off and, due to the machine gun technology prevailing at the time, any attempt to advance would expose the soft essential parts of the soldiers to the comparatively hard and sharp hail of supersonic bits of metal lobbed from the opposing side. This resulted in a lot of holes in people on the battlefield. I was also told that after some successive waves of the afforementioned fighting, that medics were allowed to go out under a flag of peace to patch the holes. One of these types of events was the Christmas Truce.

Well, I went to salvage what I could from the previous garden and a peculiar thing happened. Although cows tend to be rather docile or at least submissive creatures, as I tapped the proverbial morphine drip for a wounded kale plant (trampled by the foul bovine), the leader of the cows confronted me. I wish I had my camera. The cow came up to me as if it had reached some type of Ayn Rand type individual enlightenment* and was staring me down (and not with the usual disinterested cow type of look). His 20-30 cronies stood behind with a similar stare. This was her garden now and I was meant to know. I picked up the shovel and made it look as if I was going to hit her in the face and she didn't blink. My now obvious bluff only strengthened her resolve. I was forced to flee. 

I will try again. 

After that, I made two raised beds using some very old half-rotted timbers and charcoal soil - 

I'm considering a project reliance field day some Saturday in July - will keep you posted. 

*As if she had become awakened to the fact that she has been led around by my kind her entire life and now realizes the totality of her potential existence - me being the first obstacle in her excersizing it.