Dr. Eggplant and Mr. Cultivation

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A beautiful day! No sun, but the drizzle stopped this morning, I got a call from one of my sons, and we had a really nice visit here at the farm with lovely friends.

Today was to be a day of catch up work and, I suppose it was, in a way. Except the only thing we caught up on was cultivation and more cultivation.

The steady precipitation we've gotten over the last few weeks has managed to occur on pretty much every block of time we had available to do much work outside, so cultivating has not been steady.

When you can keep up on it, it goes quickly, but if your weeds have taken root, you have to go deeper and you run into rocks and you have to clear them out, and you break cultivators.

Fairly early this morning I was going around the corn hills...










...and the old wood just snapped. We toyed with the idea of buying a powered cultivator, but that was when we thought it might be 50 dollars. Upon looking them up online, we discovered they were several hundred dollars. So off we went to the home improvement center to buy a replacement handle, an additional cultivator so Michael and I could work together when needed, and a little spiky thing that fits between plants so we don't have to get on our hands and knees to work there.

Here is a tip on how to replace a handle on your garden tools. You place the metal working piece into the hole at the end of the pole, then pound in with a hammer until the metal cuff is bent out and fits snugly. Don't bend your tool, use some sort of metal implement such as a big screwdriver or something to lay between the tines and pound on that with the hammer.






The eggplants are about done in by those flea beetles. I looked for large plants in town, but they were almost 4 dollars each. That, along with all the labor to grow them, puts the price per fruit pretty darn high, in my opinion. I bought new seeds instead, but the same will happen again. So I purchased ONE eggplant...






... and put in under a jar to see if the flea beetles would find it. They did not, at least all this first day. I can't leave the jar there on warm or sunny days, it will be baked eggplant way too soon. But I hope my wee brain comes up with some sort of brilliant idea to protect them.






I don't buy a lot of eggplant, but I have a garden, and I'm going to grow them! Because that's what gardens are for.

I can smell the Parmesan, Italian seasonings, and bread crumbs in the oven already.

Faith

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