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.
Because of the dreaded virus ravaging our country, we had been unable to meet our newest grandson, born in January. Initially we didn’t want to add any stress to their lives with their household of 5 children, 3 under the age of 4, so we decided to give them a month or so to settle in, then COVID came to visit and as we are in the at risk age and health group, we determined it was not in anyone’s best interest for us to drive across the state and stay in a hotel in an area of the state that was a hot spot. Yesterday, they headed west to a family wedding and had to pass by a nearby town on the interstate. Last night after dark, we drove to a fast food restaurant just off that interstate and met them, masked and socially distanced and finally got to meet our newest grandson, see the two little girls that were an infant and a 2 year old when we last saw them, and the two older grands as well. The only two that really know us are the older two. All of the children are beautiful, healthy children and it was so good to see them even if we couldn’t hold the littles and hug the bigs. We did take pictures, but I don’t post pictures of my grandchildren without permission and didn’t think to ask last night.
It continues to be hot and humid with occasional thunder storms, so haying still hasn’t begun on our farm and garden work is limited to early morning or late evening. Today I will harvest and freeze more green beans, I’m sure that the last two days storms have caused the small ones to thrive and swell.
I continue to spin on my spindles, adding a few grams of fiber each day, most of the spinning done on the front porch under the ceiling fan, in the car on the way to two dentist appointments for hubby in a week, neither of which have resolved the problem, or sitting in my stressless chair in the evenings. I have spun about 100 grams of fiber in the first 12 days of the Tour de Fleece/Jenkins Team, some has been plied. The darker fiber on the smaller spindles is the weft on the sample scrap scarf I am weaving on my rigid heddle loom. Hubby bought me the stand for it recently which makes weaving on it so much easier that I actually pull it over to my chair and weave a few rows several times a day. The hand spun warp is sticky and one of them must not have been tightly enough spun as it keeps breaking requiring me to tie in a piece. I’m hoping I am past the fragile area and it will hold together for the remainder of the project. It is going to be entirely spun on Jenkins Turkish spindles.
Stay safe everyone. Be cautious, wear a mask, wash your hands.
The morning as usual was spent doing some garden maintenance. The asparagus tops so tall that they were shading the tomatoes and laying on the electric wire at the top of the fence, got a hair cut. I know they need the tops to feed the crowns and I didn’t cut them down, but reduced them to about 4 feet and used the ferny tops in the compost and as mulch in the paths around the bed. Nothing was harvested today, but some weeding done. It was hot, even early. After animal chores and garden time, breakfast on the back deck, and quiet household tasks, I took my spindles to the front porch to sit and spin and watch the Hummingbirds and the doe and her tiny spotted fawn.
The spinning is using locks from a clean Jacob wool fleece, spinning one lock at a time.
The walk up to the mailbox this afternoon was brutal. The cicadas have quieted, gone back to ground for 17 years, but there is evidence of their visit everywhere. The young tips of some trees dead, they seem to have liked the young oaks and locusts most. It would have been nice if they liked the Autumn Olive.
Tucked between two pines on the edge of the driveway where they won’t be mowed by the hay farmers or by me is a nice little patch of milkweed beginning to bloom. I’m not seeing the butterflies yet though.
After dinner we drove to the nearest town to get an ice cream cone from the ice cream parlor/arcade that is never busy early in the evening, but they are closed on Monday and Tuesday. Across the road is a river outfitter that has a small cafe and sells ice cream by the scoop as well. There were 4 employees and at least half a dozen customers in there and no one had on a mask except us. As we were leaving, we did see one older man putting on his mask as he entered. We are seeing a few more at our village store, but they seem to not be a safety measure that most in this community believe will help. Our county cases have tripled and has 1 hospitalization now. What is it going to take for people begin to be safe and take this virus seriously.
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.
July 4, 2020 would have been my mother’s 96th birthday. As kids, it was celebrated at a neighborhood pool party and feast. We lived in what is now the suburbs of Virginia Beach, then a county. Our houses were all on several acres, so neighborhood is being used loosely. Four of the houses were a Greek immigrant and his 3 sons and their families. The patriarch of the family had no idea what his birthday was so he celebrated on July 4 and one of his son’s had the pool and a fantastic outdoor kitchen with a spit and they always grilled a lamb with lemon, olive oil, and oregano. Everyone brought dishes and the kids spent the day in the pool, we ate, and celebrated Papu’s and Mom’s birthdays.
As young adults with kids of our own, there were neighborhood block parties, fireworks at the ocean front or a local park and the traffic jams trying to get home. Blacksburg and Christiansburg, the towns nearest us have fireworks and we usually have our oldest grandson at this time of year and sometimes his Dad too and we go in to see them. Not this year. With the social isolation, we went in at lunch time, for drove through food, took a walk on the old rail grade, masking when we passed anyone or were passed by cyclist, and returned home for the afternoon spent planting more corn, pulling the corn suckers from the ones that were up and transplanting them if they had roots, repairing a leaky garden hose, and watering pots and newly planted seed. I cooked burgers on the grill and had corn on the cob, then drove to a little town nearby to get ice cream only to find hundreds of people in the street looking at various cars, having some sort of street festival and no masks in sight, so we drove to the county seat to a drive through for cones. By the time we arrived back home, the sun was going down and I tackled the overgrown yellow Bearded Iris bed, first cutting back their tops, then digging them all up to divide.
An overgrown mass trimmed back.
All dug and about to be divided.
Bed done.
Three large clumps set aside for friends, the remainder tossed into an area we don’t mow where they will set roots and bloom. The finished bed will be an overgrown mess again in two years.
It just wasn’t the same watching the fireworks on TV, but some of the music was nice.
Garden and lawn tasks must be done in the early morning or after the sun is low in the sky. It is hot and humid, though neither as hot, nor as humid as summers were when we lived on the coast. Yesterday morning, after I had actually rested well the night before, I mowed the front “lawn” of the house.
A photo of a photo.
Since this aerial photo was taken by our Realtor after we bought our farm, we have built the house, gardens, bought a coop and fenced a run, planted an orchard to the east of the house, and many pines, maples, and redbuds between the barn and to the northwest of the house. Our farm is the L shaped series of hayfields containing the buildings and down to a line in the woods to the south. This is 30 acres, for the sports minded reader, about 27 American football fields. I mow about 5 acres (about 4.5 football fields) as our lawn, from south of the barn to below the septic field and from the orchard to 25 feet or so to the west of the house. The area above the barn is too rocky to mow or hay and without animals grazing on it, trees have volunteered in the 15 years we have lived here. The rest of our farm is hayfields. We have woods and cattle fields as neighbors to the west, hayfields to the east, woods to the south. This morning before it got too hot and muggy, I mowed the west and south sides of the house and around the orchard, garden, and chicken pen. It takes about 3 hours total to do the lawn on the riding mower. Another couple of hours to clean up with the line trimmer which I still haven’t done.
As I mow, I love to see what is seasonally blooming, as soon the hay will come down and so will the wildflowers within.
Moth Mullein
Chicory
The hay is shoulder high when I am sitting on the mower.
The fig I though had died.
The 3rd planting of corn is up about 6 inches but still there are sparce spots and the pumpkins failed again. I am still in the window to plant corn in this zone, so I guess I will fill in the empty spaces and our corn will come in not all at once, which I guess is a good thing. I may give up on the pumpkins, I don’t have any more seed.
During the heat of the day, I spin and make masks, though my sewing corner in the bedroom dormer gets hot with the iron on. I need to look for one of the little portable fans that are stowed away somewhere in the house.
Stay safe, wear your mask, wash your hands. We want to be able to go out again at some point and see our children and grandchildren. Phone calls and video calls are nice, but just not as good as hugs.
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.
Since I put so much effort into making the garden as maintenance free as I could this year, my intention is to try not to have idle beds. This morning after animal chores, I harvested what I thought was the end of the peas, about a pint that I intended for dinner tonight.
After lunch, I decided that since they were no longer producing that the vines should be pulled, chopped, and used to create a new compost pile. The old pile was spread and a new garden box placed where it had been. The best spot was in the corner of the garden nearest the chicken run where I took down the inner fence and a wide spot exists. It is a convenient place since the soiled straw from the coop can be put over the fence easily in that corner. As the vines were reduced to a smaller more compact pile, I added a layer of spoiled straw from the coop, and a shovel full of compost to boost it along and repeated the layers until the new pile was created. The empty beds were supplemented with a good layer of the compost from the other side of the chicken run and replanted. The bed nearest the fence was planted with 4 more rows of bush green beans, and two rows of a non cold hardy Chinese Cabbage. The second bed is an experiment. It was planted with Ancho pepper seeded directly into the ground. Hopefully, they will germinate and provide a variety of hot peppers that I didn’t plant from starts this year. The other part of that bed is going to be basil, dill, and parsley to dry and save for winter. So my plan so far to not have idle beds is working.
As the vines were pulled, I realized that there were many hidden peas left, placed in a basket, and they were shelled to another quart of peas to be blanched and frozen for winter. I have a friend from the northern part of the UK and she says finding food after the harvest is called scrumping. If so, this was successful scrumping.
This is an archaic term that I use each year as the garden, orchard, and in years past, the Farmers Market begin to provide fresh food in quantity that is greater than daily use demands. It is a time when foods are prepared by blanching and freezing, or canning to put away for the times of the year where the only fresh foods are imported. The peas were the first produce in enough quantity to put some away as I shelled, blanched, and froze a gallon of fresh peas. That isn’t enough to get us through the winter, but it will be about 16 meals for the two of us.
About a week ago, I used the last pint of last summer’s herbed tomato sauce that was a base for pasta sauce. The freezer had two 2 gallon bags of whole frozen tomatoes, so today, they were peeled, chopped, and cooked down with about a quart or so of chopped and sauteed peppers, onions, carrots, mushrooms, garlic, and large handfuls of herbs. I am not ready to pull down the pressure canner that lives in the kitchen from late summer through fall, and the sauce had too many additives to be safe to water bath can, so 13 pints were packed in wide mouth glass jars and will be frozen once they cool down to refrigerator temperature. Another pint was served with angel hair pasta and a salad for our dinner. We have a chest freezer and the refrigerator freezer, so most of the vegetables are frozen, but sauces and salsas are usually canned. With that many jars of pasta sauce prepared, the tomatoes that come from the garden this summer will be canned as plain tomato sauce, crushed tomatoes, pizza sauce, and salsa. Tomato sauce and crushed tomatoes can be amended to make pasta sauce as needed and with some of the diced frozen jalapenos can be used to make chili tomatoes.
Soon the green beans will begin and as I don’t like mushy canned green beans, they will be blanched and frozen. As the pea plants are pulled, a second planting of bush beans will be planted.
Cucumbers are pickled, potatoes, onions, and garlic will be stored in the part of the basement that is not climate controlled. The tomatillos are used to make sauces and tomatillo jalapeno jam and if they are prolific, they can be frozen. I am enjoying a handful of cultivated berries every few days, but there may not be any berry jams if I can’t get to the wild berry patches around the fields.
We will enjoy fresh corn until we can’t stand another ear then it will become frozen cut corn and corn relish. The apples become applesauce, the Asian pears become pear sauce and Pear Marmalade. Hot peppers are canned and made into vinegars and hot sauces and bell peppers chopped and frozen to use in cooking during the winter. I am hopeful that a fall garden will produce carrots, spinach, kale, lettuce, and maybe fall peas. A couple of pumpkins vines produce many more pumpkins than are needed for pies and stuffed pumpkin, but the smaller Seminoles make good winter treats for the hens.
The summer season is busy and often heats up the kitchen, but the results are enjoyed through out the winter.
I am wondering if I can build an A frame that can be covered with heavy plastic to give the fall garden a few extra weeks of growing season. I think there is some left over PVC pipe in the barn that I could use if I get the correct fittings.
When not in the garden or putting by, I am spinning and knitting. The shawl that I finished and showed blocked a couple of days ago is here.
And it perfectly matches my felt hat I got last winter.
My fiber and two of my spindles ready to the Jenkins Team Tour de Fleece that begins tomorrow. I should finish the last little bit of Shetland tonight on the wheel. Once it is washed, I will measure out the yarn for my sweater and hope that I have enough or can figure another yarn to add to make it enough.
from all of the hard work that went into getting it ready this year with fence moving, cardboard placing, hay spreading, digging of mint, planting and then replanting. This morning as I do every dry morning, I took my pointed hoe over when I gave the hens their morning treat and let them into the run. Half an hour of hoeing and pulling and the garden stays neat. I am very pleased with the results of the efforts.
Bush Green Beans blooming with Tomatillos in the back, also blooming and starting to fruit. Potatoes with purple flowers the bees love.Four of the 6 tomatoes, reaching up the 7 foot poles. One of the many Comfrey for fertilizer and salve making.
After the garden maintenance, most of the peas were harvested. The plants are no longer blooming, most of the pods filled. There are still 2 or 3 meals of peas left to mature further, but two baskets picked.
It took a couple of hours to shell the gallon of peas, blanched, iced, and packed in pint jars for the freezer. I still have a package of seed, so I may try to plant fall peas this year to add to the vegetables for the winter freezer.
The corn is sprouting and the pumpkins have primary leaves. It took three tries, but if we get corn it will be terrific.
The big orange one in the last picture is the cultivar from my late Daddy’s garden. He loved the orange Daylilies and Zinneas.
I do love my gardens, both vegetable and flowers. They keep me busy from early spring to late fall with planting, maintenance, and harvesting, and provide many meals during the off season. I have never done much with fall gardening, but I am going to try to do a better job this year, putting in some cool season crops, mostly greens, and see if I can extend our harvest up to or even after the first frost.
A neighbor saw the big bear this morning up near our mailbox and the outdoor dogs in the area have been barking all morning, so it is either still near or at least it’s scent is. I didn’t see it this time.
Cabin Crafted 