Omg, there is so much to do, and I’m getting so little time out there. I’m so glad that there have been peas to pick when I’m out there. I’ve been trying to keep up with the strawberries – I’m down to less than a basket a day from 1/2 the plants.
There have been some lovely pollinators and I’ve been trying to get pictures of them. I’m so glad the zinnias are still there. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about all the pumpkins we’ll have.
Some of our lovely gourds (left) and pumpkins
In the last few days, I’ve scrambled to get cover crops planted before the rain started on Friday. On… Thursday? I planted bell beans, rye, vetch, and mammoth red clover in the big empty section on the south east side. I didn’t cover it at all – too much area to be raking. When I ran out of clover, I got more of the other seeds and kept going. I did the end of the tomato bed, the path alongside the south sunflower bed, etc. I may have done the bed to the west of the corn and beans, too. I need to check on that. I am so bad at recordkeeping these days. I also had hoed, raked, and seeded the part of north sunflower bed that didn’t have anything growing in it, along with the bed next to it, with yellow sweet clover.
Today I broadcast phacelia seed in the bed to the east of the south sunflower bed. I wonder if it will be ok – we got over half an inch of rain today. (yesterday, too)
Yesterday I was frantically picking tomatoes, strawberries, corn, and basil before the rain got going too much. Sometimes the tomatoes split before I even get to the house (too much water). Sad. Tonight I picked 2 gallons of tomatoes. Z has been trying to get them roasted and put into jars to cool and (hopefully) get frozen in a ariety of smaller bags. I want to try to dry them, even though a lot of them are beefsteak-type heirlooms. But there is the time question (gotta clean them and dry them before slicing, no?).
I need to collect more stuff around the garden and start a compost pile.
Tonight I put a couple of wagonloads of woodchips out in the path down the middle of the garden and near the north gate to the garden. I wanted to put them on the south side path to the compost pile, but I had to focus on the north path because it was bare in many spots and squishy in others.
It’s been a rough week. T was home with The Cold on Monday and there were preschool field trips to go to on Thursday and Friday! I’ve been coming in from the garden around sundown, so there’s just not that much that can get done.
Today, Saturday, I did get to do some transplanting. We moved our 1st low tunnel (the shorter one) the other night so I could have a new planting space.Tonight I transplanted a whole sixpack of Broccoli (Arcadia?) and a few curly green kale seedlings. By the end there were calls for “Mummy milk!” coming from the house and yard. I will run out of space tomorrow. Embarrassingly, there are still 2 seedlings left in one other sixpack. I think they were cabbages, but I’m not sure. Some of the recent spinach transplants are doing ok, but in other places I’m like, “am I missing some seedlings?” Probably. There are gopher mounds everywhere. I may have found a green onion seedling and later weeded it out while I was out there. Mummy needs a greenhouse so I can start my own seeds!
I’m typing this instead of continuing work on my cover crop crop plan. It’s coming along. I’m almost ready to figure out how many beds’ worth of things I have. I’m listing the amounts I have and the planting rates so I can figure out how many beds I can do of each thing (aside from rye, bell beans, and maybe vetch, which crops I think we still have a lot of stored in a different spot) I might try to plant some clovers, but I realized that 1oz of clover will cover like 60 square feet of bed, and my beds are 300 to 400 square feet, lol.
I haven’t picked strawberries since Thursday night, so I’ve got to get on that on Sunday. And pick tomatoes. It was hot today so things are bound to be gross! The purple green beans are pretty much finished. I have mostly stopped picking the summer squash, because those gigantic ones just sit on the counter and rot!
No, I haven’t forgotten about you. I’ve just been sick. Still. This cold is brutal, but at least it’s not the stomach bug that’s going around T’s school. Speaing of cold, it was 35 degrees last night, according to our wildlife camera, and we had our first rain today. Not a lot, just a few showers. A total of .15 inches, according to the weather folks.
I finished transplanting my old seedlings and got some more yesterday. Today I put a sixpack of collards and half of one of broccoli into the ground. Picked 5 ears of corn on my way out! Zak picked a lot of peppers – the padrons, I think, and the habaneros, and is trying to dehydrate them. He moved the habaneros out of the kitchen because the smell reminded him too much of getting burned from peppers.
Z did some mowing (mostly our yard and along the driveway, but also next to the corn, which is good because the western neighbors entered from that side last week and it looked terrible!) with the pushmower this weekend, and did some chisel plowing this morning while it wasn’t windy and it seemed that the rain was able to catch most of the dust. I want to get cover crops into the ground! It’s a bit early, but not if we are having an early winter (?).
This morning I made a list of the fall/winter cover crop seed that I have in the house. I tried to organize all of the seeds that are in the 2 containers, but I was there too long with T and he disorganized them. (roots, summer crops, herbs, flowers, and maybe lettuce/greens is how I organize them, with tons of packs of peas lying around, too)
The dozen-ish of (snap? they look a bit like snow) peas that survived the first planting are starting to grown little peas. T ate them tonight.
I’ve been sick this week so I haven’t been keeping up with harvesting. Picked 3 baskets of purple and green green beans today. 2 baskets of decent-looking strawberries from the west side. A big zucchini and a bolting bok choy. Some of the Cinderella pumpkins are just about ripe. The Petaluma Gold Rush beans, well, we’ve missed some. and fyi, they are a pole bean. The 1st packet I got of them didn’t say that, iirc. Think they might be an heirloom, so maybe I’ll get seed.
I checked at the sort-of hardware place across the street today to see if they had fencing, rebar, etc, and they didn’t (today), except for small widths of hardware cloth. On Monday they could sell me 10′ lengths of rebar and we’d need to cut it into 2′ pieces. Z might build another section in the next few days so I can plant the spinach seedlings I’ve had for a couple of weeks :(. I should thin those on Sunday…
Things are starting to die back (not just because of the 2nd heatwave in a week coming on) and I’m feeling pretty sad about the fall. Hopefully we can get our cover crops in, as well as fava beans and strawberries with garlic and flowers and not totally lose those.
We would need to spend like $1000 on pipes, fencing, etc to mostly keep raccoons out of all of my recent planting attempts, but there are still other animals that can get in. And more things to plant
Those animals are digging up a storm in the garden. Every night. Z has been constructing a high-cost, not-so-low tunnel to cover that one bed. He made a frame for the base of it rather than sticking the pipe over rebar that goes into the ground, so the 12 or 15-foot section he made was pretty expensive. Plus he put chicken wire (as the closest store to us calls its chicken wire “aviary wire” over… most of it. The animals have to climb about 12″ of fencing to get into the bed. Silly me, I forgot/didn’t prioritize getting this done: simply covering that hole with the row cover that’s been on the ground since we took it off a week or so again.
Sigh. My friend Chris pointed out today that he was surprised to see an inch or two of compost on the ground rather than rototilled in. We don’t have a rototiller, mostly on purpose. I guess it would be better for me to, as I’ve done in other beds in the past, put the compost out a week or more after the plants have gone into the ground. I just hate to leave the ground bare. Other people, it sounds like, often just put compost out and transplant. But they’ve been farming longer.
I have been having trouble keeping up with much of anything, and I often regret doing whatever I did instead of putting my beds back together. For instance, this morning I picked strawberries (less than 1 basket from what used to be my more productive side, and it took a long time! picking every 2 days makes sense, except for in the pest management sense) and finally transplanted the perennials. Then at the end of my morning I took a closer look at the greens beds and saw that the plants I put in yesterday were gone, plus many others. Hardly any of the peas I planted Sunday night had been dug up. Well, that might not be right, since the clods that I use to mark my progress frequently get buried. It’s so discouraging. I planted my last kale seedlings tonight and turned the compost that I started Saturday night. Then I went and checked on the peas. Some of the first ones I planted a week ago are possibly really starting to emerge 🙂
In tonight’s stew, we had our tomatoes, basil, rosemary, and onion. Oh, and chard and kale and maybe a cabbage leaf. I actually found a nice-looking head on one of the broccoli plants this weekend, yay!
I took this one last night. There are signs of at least 2 gophers in the new greens bed.
It was so awful — it sounded like Scout, the Bengal cat we fostered when Tristan was 1-2 years old (around 10 months). My friend Julie moved to Hawaii and that state doesn’t let people bring hybrid cats such as him with them. He was a very nice cat and an excellent farm kitty, but he was SO LOUD! I couldn’t take it anymore and she eventually had to move him to a friend’s place in Utah!! Here is a video of his regular meow (ok, i haven’t listened to it since i posted it). The meowing that I heard today was like when we returned from a trip and had to drive him 12 miles in a cat carrier on winding roads. It was so awful.
I tried to look into our ditch from the garden, and I had Z look from the street. I really thought the sound was coming from behind the (repaired wooden) fence across the street, but it could have been coming from under the fallen tree limb that’s at the front of the garden. If only we had a chipper. Anyhow, over time the sound turned into a kitten’s mewling (mostly). When I was looking for the video of Scout, I found one of a kitten in a bush outside of our house from September 10th of last year. I’m guessing that they had the same mom! (maybe it was even the stray female Bengal that we’ve seen here and a half-mile away)
It was so sad! I wish I could have found it. Grey Kitty hates cats, though, and would probably hate a kitten. I almost had to go back into the house because the sound was so distracting. Poor kitty. Julie thought it could be a cat in heat, but I think that the mewling means it was probably an increasingly desperate kitten.
I didn’t harvest anything today! I may have eaten a purple green bean and a strawberry, but that’s it.
I planted a sixpack each of dino kale, Champion collard greens, a green cabbage, and a red cabbage. T and I also put out some zinnia (worth a try this late?), dill, bunching onion, and rosemary seeds. This season’s 1st greens bed is toast:
farmingmum 