5 Days Away

When I was finishing the last few days of Warrant Officer Candidate School over 10 years ago, we had some of the most fascinating classes. All the classes were given by CW3s and CW4s and they were fascinating because of there succinctness and directness. One of the classes was on skills you must master to be a great Warrant Officer. I was reminded of this class during a 5 day field exercise recently when a new Warrant asked some questions on how to make the transition from NCO to CWO. Specifically how to harness NCOs the drive to help your soldiers without running over your current NCO’s responsibilities. How to become the guy that seems to magically makes thing better.

Now I can’t reveal all our trade secrets, but I will tell you about one of the abilities, typifying the magic of Warrants throughout the ages. The ability to disappear and reappear. Now you may scoff, because soldiers have been disappearing for generations, so I will explain. Its not just being able to disappear and reappear, its knowing when to do it, for the soldiers own good. I would explain more but that would be giving away the secret to the sauce.

I am trying to find out if the same can be applied to the work we are doing on the urban farm. So I was gone as I said before for 5 days. Before I left I gave instructions, hoed weeded and thinned as best I could and departed. Upon my return there was plenty of good and bad, but mostly good. The bad first my children didn’t weed much (save one) and as it can during this time of year they took a leap forward. So I thanked my son who did and took everyone else out in the heat and weeded and hoed for 3 hours, I will do more today. They filled feed bags full of weeds and complained about the heat. But we got the work done.

So the updates, the corn mounds are doing great. They are tightly packed but very prolific. In the future I will probably need to enlarge the mounds and space the corn a bit farther. But otherwise the closeness of the stocks has protected it from a few of the big wind storms we have had recently. It also grew about 10 inches in the five days I was gone, totaling 55″ tall. So far so good.

Radishes are finally being harvested, as well as beet greens and lettuce for salad. The beans and peas have lots of flowers and we should have but to eat fresh by the end of the week. With the heat well above 90 degrees every day this week our tomatoes should bear in the next 3-4 days. As you can see we are on the cusp of the bounty of the season. I hope all is going well in your plots. Deven