Gardening Day - August 13, 2010

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Finally, a day to do some catch up work outside.

Aren't these melons pretty! I wish I could remember what they are.









Picking more eggplant.





Here's a funny one.





Not my favorite kind - a lot of tough skin per inch of tender flesh, but it was all they had at the garden center when I needed to buy them; Japanese variety. They are producing really well, though, and withstanding the ferocious onslaught of flea beetles.





I just had to make sure they were about a foot tall before I planted them.





This was yet another really hot day, just like they've all been since April. I cleaned up around the back of the house, where the tree had fallen, so that looks a bit better.





We used some scrap left over from building this back porch to make more storage shelving underneath. I could not believe I didn't think of doing that for two years.





We wore our swim suits as we worked, so we could jump in whenever we couldn't stand things any more. This feels GREAT!





Time to go pick more peppers.





Bell





Jalepeno





The lettuce still bolted, despite the shade cloth. This summer was just too hot.





YAY, more Swiss chard!





Tomatoes had a really bleak year with all the heat.





The Bright Lights chard never really recovered from the grasshopper invasion, though the plain chard did. I know what I will plant from now on.





I had a terrific start on my beloved Brussel sprouts, but not keeping up on spraying allowed the moths to decimate the entire crop. This smells really bad!









Here are some beds we never got around to planting. The mulch worked well, the paths are weedy, but that can be easily taken care of. Just so long as the plants are isolated from the weeds, I'm very happy.





Here is our pepper patch. Why do these things come in packs of six?





Next year, go in with friends.

~Faith

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I Have A New Television Hit Show

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What do you get when you cross a cooking show competition with surprise ingredients with a show about gardening?

You have my new hit, "Garden Chef Smack Down".

You have chefs enter the simple home gardens of commoners, such as I. They must create a scrumptious feast out of all the ingredients that are ripe that day. And you can't make condiments from them. They must actually be combined into a meal, using all the produce and leaving nothing out.

They can use any herbs they like, if they cannot find them in the garden there.

We can have all kinds of fun with this one. We can surprise them with a live chicken to butcher. How about 40 pounds of cukes, all at once? Hopefully they won't ""smack any gardeners down for planting 20 zucchini bushes.

Yesterday was my first attempt to succeed at yard sailing. I sailed over to one yard that was advertised as a "huge" yard sale, open all week, with piano, organ, keyboard, laptop, and years of household items!!!!

We got there early. 7:30 am and parked at the side of the road. Great opportunity to do schoolwork. The weather was pretty nice compared to lately.





But the promised trucks of stuff never showed, and we sat there for 2 hours, waiting for her to open up.





Turns out, no piano or keyboard for sale, the laptop was way too much money for way too little, and I ended up spending 80 cents on a couple of clothing items. I am still clueless as to this phenomenon.

However, it was great to get school work done early yesterday. It felt like old times - up early and school done by lunch! WoooHOOOO!

Michael celebrated by throwing some knives.





We have been behind on keeping the barnyard cleared, so on the way down to pick up some t-posts for today's project, we brought the mower and the weed sprayer to take care of the V.V. - Vast Vegetation.

Whoops! Our wire that holds the trailer to the hitch since we lost the pin broke as I was driving.





Aha! A bolt! Why didn't I do this before...?





The horses have been doing much better after the Endure and Freedom products, so I'm really glad for them that we got it.





Having collected up the t-posts and post driver and dropping them off at the lettuce row, we began working inside. Michael handled unrolling the 50' clothesline coil we bought for 4 dollars, so he could cut it in half.





And I began sewing this stuff. The least expensive landscaping fabric WM had; a 3 by 50 foot for $9.99.





I cut it to about 23' feet in length, and sewed two pocket hems along both edges to slide the covered wire through.





And here you can see several views of how we tied the wires to the posts, creating a shaded area for the lettuce bed. Fortunately, the bed faces exactly south, so directing the fabric could not have been easier. We can access the bed from the north side and the sun will not touch the lettuce except for the early morning and late evening time.





I do not expect this to last more than one season, but to replace what will rot will only cost 5 dollars a year. We did consider a more traditional hoop setup, but I was trying to go cheaper. We'll see how it works out.

Here's the baby lettuces. Shade growing here is an experiment, and I'm hoping to succeed in getting lettuce year 'round by the time I'm done.





We did not run the whole length of the bed, as the clothesline was only a 50' foot length, so it's 23' foot, with another 10 feet maybe to use otherwise.





And here's a good view after the the sun made an appearance. I am concerned about wind and rain. We clipped the fabric to the wire, but a good strong wind may overcome it. Rain may possible weigh it all down. We'll have to keep and eye on it. I'm wishing I'd set that more horizontally.





Yesterday's harvest: Eggplant, peppers and tomatoes.





Speaking of which, I'm not really happy with the tomatoes progress. Still, I guess they can do more growing.





Swiss chard.





I washed all of this up and Michael offered to put up a cucumber trellis.





Great job! Now if we can only get them to grow...





All I can say is that I guess the ground is not yet fertile enough. However, I hope that if we can continue mulching, we'll get a good bit of earthworms in here and the soil will improve steadily.

I'm pleased with the leeks. I hope they do well wintering over in the beds, so I can have leek soup all winter.





And it's been a wonderful year, comparatively, for the Brussels sprouts and eggplant.





The peas are done. We did not get many, what with the very warm spring temperatures.





He loves his swimming time.





We had wonderful fellowship time with friends at Bible study again last night, before we headed off for office cleaning. We are almost through Romans and I'm really glad the group has decided to do a Torah study I've done in the past. That begins in a couple of weeks.

I hear shouting.... Oh, that's the cherries and gooseberries calling.

~Faith

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A Day in the Spring-Rush Life

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Every spring is a bit of a rush, everything begins happening at once. This spring has been especially busy. In addition to starting the garden, we've had so many things in need of repair due to years of neglect, we also do not know what the future is going to bring for us, so we are trying to get some bigger projects done, such as building a greenhouse, to help us with our food production.

You might think this is normal for us, but we usually have more time. The key to not slaving your life away on a farm is to plan well, and do your projects in such a way as to eliminate maintenance as much as possible. I happened to marry someone who believed in just getting a job done as quickly as you can, and hang what happens later. So a lot of careful planning went kaput!

So we are scrambling trying to get things done. But as soon as the garden is completely in, the work will slow to a manageable level and we can relax a bit more, have quiet evenings and grill our dinner as we watch the sunset, and relax a lot more, especially in the heat of the day.

Until that time, we are grateful for the cooler weather we've been having. Very mild. Yesterday was mostly cloudy and in the 70's. Perfect for outdoor work. Here are some scenes...

How old is this stuff anyway? I'm trying to frugally use what we have from years ago when I was really working the land here.






Here are the T-posts we finally had time to remove for re-use in the garden. The horses are now officially OUT of the crop area. Since I was not allowed to spend money on the crops, I had moved the fence up there so at least the grass could be eaten. The place was essentially one big horse pasture. LOL






This is the one garden box we put in last year. It was intended to be short term, so we just bought some very inexpensive wood and filled it with half sawdust and half cow manure from the neighbor's barn and sawmill. It was too rich for planting last year, but has broken down nicely. We still need to plant lettuce there.






We used some leftover mix from the pile near that box, added some red clay from right next to the house. (It will not grow anything, but I figure must have GREAT mineral content.)...





I dug up a few shovels full of forest topsoil, while Michael gathered a few forks of grass cuttings and we mixed this unique concoction up for our potato boxes.









We are way behind on this project. The plants are growing very quickly and we still need to gather more wood for the sides. Finding soil is a challenge to me. It needs good soil, but good topsoil is hard to come by on this property and if I take it from somewhere, I am just robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Before:




And After. With the mix being nice and light, we were able to just sprinkle shovels full over the tops, working it around the stems with our fingers. I forgot, I need to water them. They need to be good and wet.





My goal has always been to grow organically. But it can take a lot of work. Once a pest finds you, you have to use all your wiles and all kinds of tricks to combat them. Starting from scratch in this spot, having it be such a large garden and being unprepared for them as I would have liked, I may use sprays if I can't keep them from devouring my produce. I was, at one time, going to go for organic certification of my land. But now, it's all about feeding us, not knowing what could happen.

So, I am still trying to foil the flea beetles. They have found and are beginning to eat the large eggplant after eating all 10 of my seedlings. The jar kept most of them off, one or two had gotten in there from the soil, but you can't keep your plants under glass, it was mostly just a learning experience for me on how the beetles find your plants. They are supposed to be attracted to white. These are cut up milk cartons smeared with petroleum jelly.





And the only ones you see on here are the ones I purposefully flicked there when finding the plant covered with them.





The vanishing brussel sprouts. A vole, I think. It's gotten quite a few of my plants. I was hoping the fishy smell from my fertilizer might make it go away. This is the kind of stuff that keeps you busy when you think you are going to be doing something else...





On the right, the carefully planted row of carrot seeds Michael worked on. See them? Yeah, there's a couple. LOL On the left, the packet that got knocked over.





Radish babies!





Getting shoes on for more work. We are doing a block schedule of horticulture for this semester. And math. LOL You can never stop doing math.





Michael, collecting rocks we've picked out of the garden soil to go line the chicken yard fence.





We also spent most of the morning mowing. All the area around the house, the crops, and then any areas those horses don't eat down. If we don't, the scrub trees come up and later we have to go down and chop them. It's just easier to mow everything down when it's small.

We went to plant more of our herb seedlings, but the ground was getting too hard again, so we watered and are going to plant in the morning.





We did a lot of weeding as we mowed. The blackberry row is looking OK. It still needs more manure. They are really heavy feeders. These blackberries were expensive and have not had much care over the last 5 years. One of these, properly cared for can give you 20 gallons of the biggest, sweetest blackberries you ever ate. I'm going to beat those Japanese beetles this year if it kills me.





Here are some coming up in the row. I should probably take them out.





And this one is a little spindly because it's also sharing with another heavy feeder, an asparagus plant. The birds love the bright red asparagus seeds from our bed and we find new plants at many fence posts and tree branches.





We planted over 100 grape vines, about 35 different varieties. The whole thing is a long story that I won't drag out. But they were going to be intensively pruned as I'd read about in one type of grape culturing book. So they are planted quite closely. Because of neglect, quite a few have died. That's OK because at this point I don't have the luxury of spending all that time intensively pruning. Here is one end of the vineyard...





And the other end...





Looking uphill, the vineyard sits low. We did a lot of weeding, mowing and tying up here as well. Much left to do.





Our hardy kiwi arbor. The fruits are remarkable. I hope to get some one day. LOL





It's looking a bit saggy though. I built it out of red cedar trunks harvested from this land, and purchased vinyl lath with a 2x4 top.





Blooms! But is it male or female? Only one produces fruit and needs another. I suspect another fruitless year. I need to replace the ones that died on the other side of the arbor before I get fruit, I'm guessing.





Uh-oh. Need to root out some poison ivy that has found a spot under the arbor.





Our bush cherries are filled out.





Evidence! We will get some cherries this year! As the bushes were planted in a frost pocket, we don't often get them.





Now we are just enjoying the perfect evening. It feels so great to have accomplished things that needed doing, and then enjoy the beauty we live in.

Hunting rabbits at the sinkholes...





Playing in the water...









Some of the gooseberries. Will be time to make gooseberry pie soon.





These strawberry plants only went in a couple of months ago, so they are a little small, but they are still trying to contribute to the season. Mostly everbearers, and a few June bearers.





OK - this one is going to kill itself trying!





This will be the first strawberry to eat. :)





Time for well-deserved play. It was deliciously windy all day and, as everyone knows, jumping is way more fun in the wind.





Fat and sleek horses.





I missed the gorgeous light this morning on those wildflowers. Drat!





Why is it that the volunteers spring up quickly, deep green, healthy and strong...





And the squash I labored intensely over for two months and spent money on seeds and pots for, look like they have malaria?





But don't the sugar snap peas looks amazing? They are covered with blooms. Can't wait to stand in the field and eat my veggies.





I'm going in. It's almost chore time.





Our list is getting shorter. At least until we add to it. ;) Michael came up with some ideas yesterday he wants to do as well.

Faith

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