A Week On the Farm – September 13,2013

As the week and the summer draw to a close, the fall garden is beginning to take off as the summer garden is almost gone. Today, we picked our first batch of fall bush beans and enjoyed them for dinner while preparing 8 more meals of them for the freezer to enjoy this winter when the days are cold and the snow falls.

The tomato plants are all brown, the last of the tomatoes ripening or being attacked by grasshoppers and stinkbugs. The only ones left are small yellow, orange plum and Roma tomatoes. The volunteer that is sprawled through the grape bed, is producing the best crop right now.

The potato growing experiment was less than successful. We tried growing them in half barrels putting a couple inches of compost in the bottom, planting the seed potatoes and then adding more compost as the tops grew a few inches. We were hoping for a couple of barrels full of nice potatoes, but only got about 10 lbs. They are tasty though, we had some mashed with dinner tonight.

Today, for the first time, the hens produced 8 eggs. That leaves only one who still hasn’t figured out how to lay an egg.

The freezer, in spite of the cool wet summer, is beginning to look like it will hold us through the winter months. If the beans continue to produce, the peas make it to production size, the cabbages and broccoli are heading nicely, the chard is developing this time, we will be able to put more away and enjoy some more fresh produce. Today only reached the low 70’s and it is going into the 40’s tonight. The weather “prognosticators” are threatening us with an early and snowy winter, I hope they are wrong for a while.

The 4 1/2 week old meat chicks are tightly snugged in the chicken tractor with a tarp covering most of it and a heat lamp on to help them through the cold night.
On the craft front, our daughter in law asked me to make two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle hats for two of our grandchildren as part of their Halloween costumes. One of the hats is almost finished, pictures will follow next week once they are finished.
Life is good on our mountain farm.