The mowers did most of the farm down the mountain, but the rest of the back field was partially mowed and has sat idle for several days. Our hay still stands. Maybe this week, maybe not, the weather will control that. This is as late as it has ever stood, I don’t know about hay nutrition, but I would think that when the seed heads mature and drop their seed that the hay loses nutrition, but it means it is self seeding the fields.
I found the concentrated citric acid weed killer a couple of days ago and mixed up a gallon at the lowest concentration to spray the inside of the walled garden. It did a fairly good job on miner’s lettuce and a few other tender weeds, barely touched the grass and the pigweed thumbed it’s leaves at it. I guess I will up the concentration and try again. I don’t want any of that coming up once the cardboard and mulch are put down. Yesterday and today are fairly comfortable temperatures and I was hoping to get that job done but it will have to wait another day or two if the second spraying does work.
The daylilies continue to bloom and brighten the east side of the garage. I love spring and early summer as first the iris bloom, then the Dutch iris, and finally the daylilies. The Calendula bed really self seeded last year and it is full of blooms, far more than I will use in a year of making herbal salve. I will gather some seed and add a patch of it to the walled garden for bright yellow and orange color. The marigolds in the vegetable garden that I planted from seed are about to bloom, but the plants that I bought and put in half barrels look puny.
I am continuing to spin on the Jenkins Turkish spindles for the Tour de Fleece/Jenkins Team. It is fun seeing what item you have to seek to photograph with your spindle(s). However, Ravelry recently changed their website and though it is cleaner in appearance, it is an ocular migraine inducer for me. They have a link to a variation of their old look, but it really isn’t and it too causes the migraine, so I have been going on as the item is listed, posting my photo and staying off the rest of the day. Yesterday was spent mostly making masks for family. Some of yesterday’s that were made.
Well off to find a “Christmas or Holiday ornament that can hang” for today’s hunt. I have plenty, but the boxes are all stored away, nothing got left out by accident. The spindles are ready.
In the heat and humidity, it took 3 mornings to get the lawn done. Yesterday morning I broke out the monster Stihl line trimmer and got around the house, garden, the coop, and within the walled garden. I mixed up a gallon of salted vinegar and sprayed the stone path where I don’t want weeds to grow and where sterilizing the soil isn’t a problem. I need to get the cardboard down in the walled garden while the grass is short, but I need compost to put on it. Perhaps I should arrange a load to be delivered. A friend told me about a vinegar based weed killer that doesn’t contain salt. My research shows it is a concentrate of vinegar, lemon juice, clove oil, and soap. Maybe I will try it on the grass in the walled garden first if I can get it without going in a crowded store. The tops from the Iris that I cut back were added to the compost pile and more spoiled hay on top of that.
After the sun started down and some clouds came in, I moved 18 T posts that have been laying in the grass for weeks, beyond the chicken pen with grass and weeds growing through them. I weed wacked those weeds while the trimmer was out. Cleaned up some rocks in that area and made it easier to maintain with the riding mower when I mow back there. Slowly everything is getting easier to maintain. We still need to replace the brush hog to mow areas that the riding mower can’t handle, but can’t be hayed. There is another morning of trimming to get around the culverts and the chicken palace but they can wait. Ms. Broody is going on 8 weeks of sitting, so she is going in isolation in the chicken palace for a week to see if I can get it out of her system. For some reason the hens have decided that the nesting boxes aren’t for laying eggs and they are making a nest in the back corner of the coop. The coop is raised slightly higher than my knees and it isn’t quite tall enough to stand up in, so going in to gather their eggs is a challenge. I put a bucket in that corner and they just made a nest next to it.
This morning was reserved for vegetable garden maintenance and new harvest. There are always a few weeds to pull and I’m being a zealot when it comes to the Creeping Charlie that with pulling, cardboard and aggressive monitoring, so far is mostly developing outside the garden and I’m keeping it away from creeping in. If a tiny bit crops up in a bed, it is quickly dispatched. If I get the vinegar based weed killer, I may spray the outside base of the garden fence. The morning inspection and weed pulling showed me that the garlic and potato onions are just about ready to pull and dry and just in time because the box they are in was planted last fall before I rebuilt the other boxes and it is literally bursting apart at the seams. And I should be looking into buying garlic for fall planting before it is all sold out.
Once the onions and garlic are out, the box will be rebuilt, the soil supplemented with a wagon load of compost and it will hold a fall crop or two.
The Tomatillos are a large variety. I bought plants this year, though if I had been patient, I could have transplanted volunteers from last year’s crop that sprang up in one of the pea beds where they were planted last year. The cucumbers are resisting climbing the trellis and have to be encouraged every few days, but there are dozens of tiny just forming fruits so fresh cucumbers and pickles will soon be enjoyed.
The bush style green beans are prolifically developing. The first few meals harvested this morning will be blanched and some frozen this afternoon, the rest enjoyed with dinner. It will be a daily harvest now for a while until they quit blooming, then there will be a wait until the second planting which has sprouted grow large enough to give us a another crop.
There are raspberries that I didn’t expect to produce this year not to make jam, but enough to top my granola and yogurt each morning. Soon the kitchen will be hot and steamy every day as beans are blanched, pickles are canned, then tomatoes and peppers to process and hopefully corn to be eaten fresh off the cob as well as blanched and cut from the cob for winter cut corn. There are two developing Chinese cabbages, the second planting of them hasn’t come up yet. I wonder if they can be fermented. Hmmm, Kimchi.
The grape vine that I totally decimated to get it up off the ground in late winter or early spring which I didn’t expect any fruit from this year is laden with bunches of tiny grapes. There will be grape jam this year even if I never can get to the berries. They are a Concord variety, so the jam is deliciously grapey.
The hay cutters have one more field to the east of us, the rest are mowed, baled and lined up for them to move to their fields as winter feed for their cattle. I doubt they will get to us this week because every day til Friday has a 40 to 80% chance of thunderstorms. Next week’s projection looks better, but who knows how that will change in a week.
Later today, we will make our weekly curb side pickup of supplies from the Natural Foods store. This is even more important for the next few weeks as cases of Covid have increased in this part of the state, not substantially, but worrisome all the less, and daughter spent a week away from home in an area that was heavily infected, so we will have to be even more isolated from her for a couple of weeks. She avoided going out, but we still want to be careful.
Stay safe everyone. Wear a mask, wash your hands. We want to meet our now 6 month old grandson we still haven’t been able to meet.
The one social media that I am enjoying regularly these days is one for fiber artists. A group to which I belong on this site is for the Jenkins spindles that I love. Each year during Tour de France, they participate in Tour de Fleece and as there is no Tour de France this year, we are doing a daily scavenger hunt of objects in your home and showing them in a photograph with one or more of your spindles holding at least 1 gram of fiber spun within the 24 hours prior. It has been so much fun looking for the object, posting it with or without a story that goes with it and then reading the other 100+ folks posts. Items like a handheld kitchen gadget, a jigsaw puzzle, an unfinished fiber project.
A favorite piece of art on your wall.
A non fiber equipment wood item
A spherical object
Every day is a new item and more fun. I spin much more than a gram of fiber a day on my spindles. Today a new acquisition arrived in the mail. It is the tiny Olive wood spindle with the rusty colored fiber in the lower edge of the bowl.
This has been a fun activity, the first week just ending. At the end of the 17 days, we will have earned entries into drawings for prizes from 6 Jenkins spindles, fiber, project bags, patterns. The number of successful days determines the number of entries.
Some of my time is being used to make masks. Eldest son’s family were needing some and he is bearded with a long face, so patterns are being altered.
Other time is being spent in the early mornings in the garden, though there is little to harvest right now. The second plantings are beginning to sprout. The hay still stands tall, though the mowers are getting this direction, the fields near us are being done now. Grass mowing has to be done in the early mornings or near dusk.
