Yay! We Are Finally Gaining Ground!

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Today we actually had down time. We still have a lot of work to do, no question, but it's at the point now where the work can begin to be planned, rather than dragging us around like accidentally getting caught on a bumper and trying to keep your feet underneath you at 60 mph.

We got a lot of fertilizing and cultivating done. We planted most of the last of the herb seeds I'd not gotten to yet. We also straightened up the house a little bit, knowing we'd be gone much of the day tomorrow. I really hate coming home to a messy house.

I missed showing our first lettuce harvest about 4 days ago.





It's nice but we did not notice until putting it away in the house that the leaves were covered with tiny little green gnats. If I don't figure out how to wash them out of all those delicate little green leaves, we are going to be getting protein we didn't bargain on.





I also missed relating about our mint mishap. Isn't this beautiful? We worked so hard, getting in these newest beds of various herbs....

Not so fast. Michael accidentally grabbed a MINT flat instead of a nice tame, laid back Italian herb.





Here is what was SUPPOSED to go in! LOL





So we had to dig it all out again and plant in the other. We had been trying to decide where to put these mints for a long time. But finally, we just were ready to forget about them. We recycled most of the flats and just put a few in pots to keep them contained. We have common, lemon, spear, and peppermints here.





Back to today....

The birds have been eating our strawberries. This is the first one we got, and Michael shared it with me.





A sage we put in.





And though I had a packet of lavender seeds, even freezing them, I never tried to plant them, but chickened out and bought this at WalMart.





I don't think I had shown our upper crops yet. Here is one end of our asparagus bed. Impressive, right?





Well, here's the other end. LOL Not enough care. Perhaps this fall I can give it the manure and straw it deserves.





I'm really sad that my hardy figs died back to the ground again. That means no crop again this year. I did not think it was that cold, but apparently it was. I don't like dried figs much, but I love fresh. They will produce two crops, a spring and fall, but our season is not really long enough, so if you don't have fruit producing wood ready to go in the spring, you won't get a crop. These new branches will grow figs, but when frost hits, they'll still be green, small, and unripe.





You can bury them, but it's more work than I want to do right now. Here's some new growth.





Blackberry plants; The Good -









The bad -





And the ugly. Anyone know why leaves in only a few selected spots turn vivid yellow this way? I fertilized them, but I don't think that's the problem.





And Michael's friendly lizard.





Too many posts in one day! And I've picked up poison ivy again. Bummer.

Faith

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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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