Cabin Crafted

Category: farm

  • He got out

    The forecast is for 85% chance of rain today and was low yesterday until late afternoon, so the Big Bad HD was ridden to the city yesterday for it’s annual servicing and inspection. My efforts to repair the driveway were successful enough that he got the bike up the gravel driveway, on to the gravel road, and safely on the hardtop. I followed along in my car to bring him home as the bike was being left until service and a couple replacement parts that had to be ordered come in for installation. The bike had a broken rearview mirror on the left side and the left tail light was out, so I tried to stay close enough to prevent someone from getting between us, but far enough back to not crowd him in case of a problem. Only twice did another vehicle get between us.

    The number of COVID cases are much higher in the city and we saw a much better compliance with mask wearing, except at the Harley dealership. I did not see a single mask on a front end employee through the windows and not a customer going in or coming out wearing one. Hubby kept his helmet on with the face shield down until he was back to the car where he donned a mask. You know you have been confined too long when a trip to the city staying in the car followed by carry out from “The Weiner Stand” is an exciting day.

    Early in the week, after yet another big basket of cucumbers were harvested, instead of pulling the vines, I pruned them sharply to slow down the volume of fruits being harvested. I still want some fresh cucumbers for salad, but I am pickled out. Day before yesterday, another batch of spicy Bread and Butter pickles were salted and left to sit and weep for the day, another quart of fermented dill spears started. That evening, the Bread and Butters were finished and canned, having wisely started the water bath to heat up while I was preparing dinner. DIL is excited that if we can pass in the night somewhere, sometime, she will get a new flat of pickles for her shelves. The refrigerator is full here with quick brines and ferments of pickles, beans, and kraut. I am seriously considering looking for a dorm size refrigerator to put in the basement, just for those items. I am just starting on pickling the jalapenos and if history is followed, there will be 8 to 10 quarts of them before the first frost. I may can some so they are shelf stable. I have had to purchase 3 quart cans of pickled jalapenos for hubby as we ran out of last year’s before more were ready.

    They do make a pretty presentation.

    I am jealous of Son1 and DIL’s garden. This spring, their first in their new house, they build several long raised beds and heavily mulched the paths and their garden is gorgeous from the photos I have seen. Their back yard is flat. Since many of my cedar boxes, including ones I restructured this past winter and spring are rotting away, I am thinking about reusing some of the old deck materials to make 4 by 16′ beds which will be fairly easy as most rows are either a series of 4 X 4′ boxes or a 4 X 8′ box and a 4 x 4′ box. This will eliminate the down hill paths and perhaps slow the downhill run off. If I do this, I will invest in a load of mulch to put down in the paths after first putting down another layer of cardboard. The old hay I currently use always has some grasses that sprout in the paths, even with cardboard. With the new walled garden bed, I will not be using the plastic half barrels in the back, so I think I will replant the raspberries in them as the bottoms of the wooden ones have rotted out. If I move them while transplanting, I can extend the blueberry bed another 4 to 8 feet and add more blueberry bushes.

    Each day, some time is spent on the spindles, spinning the two fibers currently being spun into yarn. The two make a vibrant bowl of color by my chair.

    I recently purchased another smaller spindle from someone and the tracking says it is out for delivery. The one I bought is a better size to carry with me in a small tea tin with a bit of fiber to have when we are sitting behind roadwork or an accident as happened last weekend, or when I am passenger in the car headed in to town to pick up curbside groceries from the Eats, our natural food store.

    Stay safe everyone.

  • Non-venomous, still not welcome

    My Facebook memory from this morning was the 6 foot black rat snake that I extracted from my chicken coop exactly a year ago to the amazement of my then 14 year old grandson. Then about 5 weeks ago, another about 5 foot one from the coop, and last night just as a thunderstorm was beginning, I went over to lock up the hens who had wisely gone into the coop to find another 6 footer lounging on the outside of the coop, right at waist height. I walked past it in the deepening gloom without seeing it and spotted it when I came back out. Another 5 gallon bucket with lid grabbed, a call into the house for hubby to put on shoes and grab keys.

    July 27, 2019; June 22, 2020, July 26, 2020

    When I grabbed the one last night, it wrapped it’s tail around the gate handle that I use to secure the chicken run gate closed and was so strong that it almost pulled it’s head from my grasp. It was stretched out on the trim board above the handle it’s head half way down the length of the coop and it’s tail on the trim piece behind that fiberglass post.

    I don’t kill them, but I don’t want them in my coop, eating eggs, feed, or babies when there are any, so they are put in a lidded 5 gallon bucket and taken away from the farm. The first two were dropped off in the wood about a half mile from home. This one was taken two miles away and dumped. I have to admit, that I never handled a snake before these three except for twice. Once when I took a small, 2 foot Hognose snake into my classroom from the adjoining classroom to show one of my Biology classes, the second time to feel, but not hold a python. Snake skin is dry, cool, and smooth, they are not slimy like some people think. They are well muscled and you can feel the muscle movement when they coil or try to.

    Hubby is not a fan. He would prefer that they stay in the woods well away from us. When we bought a house in Virginia Beach when our children were young, the air handler was in the ceiling above the family room. The first time I went up to change the filter as it was a crawl on your hands and knees to get to it fit, I found several snake skins. Later that summer, a black rat snake crawled out of the hole in the brick where the condenser tube ran and he commented that if the snake was found in the house, he was moving out. Last night, he was taking the picture above and afterward, I lowered the snake in the bucket at my feet with the lid in my right hand. That snake did not want to be in that bucket and before I could get the lid firmly on, it tried to escape, in the direction of hubby who was standing back about 6 feet with the camera. I caught the snake and secured it, but his reaction before I did was priceless. I thought he had learned to fly, he jumped back so fast and so high (he says this is an exageration).

    They have their place, eating rodents, but their place is not in my coop.

    It did rain for a little while last evening and this morning, the farm was shrouded in fog. By the time the chores were done, the fog had lifted except at the tops of the trees and the mountain tops.

    It was very pretty sitting on the porch with my breakfast and coffee watching it shift and having the territorial little Hummingbirds fly around through the covered porch chasing each other off.

    The fog mist had settled on the asparagus ferns in the garden and they glittered like they were covered with thousands of tiny diamonds this morning.

    The row of sunflowers are producing more blooms each day, bronze, lemon yellow, and Hopi dye seed varieties. Non of the wild Kansas sunflower seed that my sister sent produced plants this year.

    It is going to be another hot and humid day, Roanoke, the nearest city has broken their weather history for the most consecutive days above 90 degrees f. It has gotten that hot here a few times in the past months, but mostly hovering in the upper 80’s. We await the mobile vet to check out the big guy and to administer vaccines possibly and do heartworm tests if the pups cooperate. The visit will be socially distanced on the front porch.

    Stay safe, wear your mask. Let’s beat this virus.

  • Canning has commenced

    and putting by continues. The garlic is ready to braid. I can braid hair, surely I can figure out how to braid garlic. The onions are nearly ready to relocate to the cooler, drier basement out of the hot humid garage. The potato tops are nearly all brown. I dug one plant to have new potatoes with fresh green beans, cucumbers and vinaigrette, and sauteed Chinese cabbage and onion with last night pork loin roast. I will give the potatoes about a week more to toughen the skins, then dig them and put on the wire shelves in the basement as well. The cucumbers are producing prolifically. We have been enjoying the first of them in salads and with onions in vinaigrette, but there were finally enough to make the first batch of pickles today. Son 1’s family, especially DIL and grandson 1 really like a recipe that I modified several years ago. Food in Jars by Melissa McClellan has a Bread and Butter pickle recipe in it. I substituted about 1/2 c of sliced Jalapenos for some of the sweet red pepper that it called for and it make a sweet and spicy pickle. I had red, yellow, and orange peppers sliced in the freezer and a pint bag of sliced jalapenos, a huge yellow sweet onion and all the spices I needed. The veggies were cut, tossed with the pickling salt, covered and put in the refrigerator this morning early.

    My giant pottery bread bowl was called into service. After dinner tonight, the water bath canner was hauled down off the high shelf, filled with pint jars and water and set on the stove to heat up. The veggies were rinsed, the brine made, the veggies cooked in the brine until hot and packed in the jars. I had put an extra 12 ounce jar in the canner because the recipe says it makes 5 pints. I have had it make more and less, so I want to be prepared. It made 5 3/4 pints this time.

    I need to put a note in the recipe that it take almost twice the amount of brine that she calls for and every year I end up in the middle of loading the jars, making more brine. The jars are cooling on the counter. At lunch today, I opened one of the last jars from last year’s batch. They are put out at family meals, I use them in tuna salad, but otherwise I am stingy with the ones I keep for me. Most of them will go to Son 1’s family. The next big batch of cucumbers will be made into dill spears, or whole dills if I can catch enough small ones at the same time.

    While the pickles were processing, I shredded a cabbage and salted it. The salt is massaged in until the liquid begins to weep out. It will sit for an hour and then be packed tightly into a sterile quart jar and set up to ferment for sauerkraut. The dilly beans from a few days ago are perfect and I have already enjoyed a few of them.

    The versatile big bowl in service for the second time today. The refrigerator style pickles and ferments were made in greater quantity when there was a second old refrigerator in the basement, but it gave up two years ago, so the ferments are more limited now. If the second or third planting of bush beans are as prolific as the first planting was, I will made some canned dilly beans that will keep on the shelves.

    Between rain storms this afternoon, I planted a third planting of bush green beans. I had used all of my seed, but Southern Exposure Seed company where I get most of my seed still have the one I plant in stock, so I ordered a packet when I ordered my fall vegetable seed and they came yesterday. The first planting of beans are spent, the plants will be pulled soon and the cucumbers can run in that direction too. Their leaf cover will help hold down weed growth in that end of the bed. I thought the cucumbers were semi bush variety, but they have vines 6 or 8 feet long already. Last year the only thing planted in the same bed were sunflowers so I guess they just climbed them. The fence I placed for them is way too short.

    Soon there will be tomatoes and pepper to process and in about a month, the fall veggies planted. I thought the Chinese Cabbage second planting was a failure, but they must just be very slow to germinate as it appears that there may be a dozen or so plants coming up. They will be thinned out to give them space. The one I cooked is more like Napa cabbage than head cabbage, the leaves are bright green.

    That is the one I picked yesterday on the left of the picture. I don’t know how well they will keep. I don’t think they will freeze well, but maybe there will be some Kimchee in the future, or Napa style sauerkraut.

    It is nice to be adding to the larder instead of just using from it. It was exciting to do an entire meal except for the protein from the garden last night. When I planted the beans today, I also planted a short season ground cherry. I have never planted them before and want to try to make some jam from them if they are successful. I hope we get a decent thunderstorm, the earlier one rained only about 15 minutes and it didn’t even wet the soil in the garden. I may have to set up the sprinkler.

    In my post day before yesterday, I showed the results of the Tour de Fleece spinning. Today I took the ply balls and plied them on the wheel. The lighter teal ended up 334.5 yards, less than 2.5 ounces, 16 WPI (light fingering weight) yarn. The darker shiny blue is still on the bobbin as it didn’t fill the bobbin and I have more to spin which I will add before measuring it off.

    There is still about an ounce and a half of that fiber, but no more would fit on the bobbin. I don’t know if I will put it in the shop or knit something for the shop. The fiber is from Three Waters Farm and is Merino, Superwash Merino, and Silk, so very soft and drapey.

    Time to return to making sauerkraut.

    Stay safe. Wear your mask, it isn’t a political statement, it is a health and safety issue.

  • Each year, each project

    My memory on Facebook this morning from one year ago was a harvest of red ripe tomatoes and tomatillos. This year the tomatoes are all still green, there are tomatillos forming, but not ready to harvest, but the cucumbers are coming in quickly now and there are dozens of blossoms on the spreading vines. I fight them every morning to keep them from taking over the other half of the bed where some of the peppers are planted and sending the vines away from the beans and out into the corn and the path in the other direction.

    Yesterday after hubby’s appointment, we did our feed run for the critters and I purchased a new feeder to replace the one that was broken and added a second Hummingbird feeder. I couldn’t get the three tines of the double shepherd’s crook through the weedmat, soil, and underlying gravel, it was barely stuck in the ground before and mostly propped up with rocks. It can’t be put between stones in the retaining wall for obvious safety and structural reasons and I was at a loss. I finally grabbed a half barrel that was in the front by the garage door with one puny plant in it, transplanted the plant and repurposed the half barrel with soil and many rocks to stabilize it and the pole and set it on the retaining wall edge. The birds fly to the crook, look at the feeder, and fly off. So far they haven’t braved trying to eat from the hopper style feeder. The Hummingbird feeder is too far from the flowers, so the single crook will be moved to a flower bed and the feeder hung there until there are flowers in the new large walled garden.

    Once evening was dimming and the temperature was falling, the bags of compost that were just tossed over the wall onto the hay a few days ago, were opened and spread. So far, we have purchased 28 bags and it hasn’t even covered the entire area with a layer. It will probably take at least that many more, then topped with shredded leaves this fall and a layer of some sort of mulch.

    The 9 hens aren’t pulling their weight. Feed is too expensive if they aren’t going to provide food in return. Ms. Broody finally gave up sitting after 9 weeks of broodiness, but she hasn’t resumed laying. None of the Olive eggers are laying. I don’t know if it is the heat or that they are aging out. Day before yesterday, there were 3 eggs and one of them the shell was so fragile that it had been cracked in the nest by the weight of the next hen to lay. It went straight into the compost pile. Last night there were 3 and a marble with no yolk.

    I should get new chicks before it gets cold and introduce them to the layer coop and move the old ladies to the Chicken palace and give them free range during the day. There are nesting boxes in there, but past hens have been reluctant to use them.

    Yesterday, I posted that it was the beginning of fermenting season with green beans and cucumbers. Today was the beginning of a non edible, non potable ferment. The long stalks of Comfrey that fall over mid summer were cut and chopped, loaded into a couple of lidded buckets and filled with water set in the sun. It will make a stinky slimy mess that is the best garden fertilizer ever. The Comfrey that didn’t fit in the buckets is put in the compost pile or spread as mulch in the garden.

    In cutting back the stalks, I see several Comfrey volunteers that will be dug and moved over to the walled garden in the herbal medicine area. As the edible herb and medicinal herbs will be on the south and west of the retaining wall, that area is already filled deeply with the composted soil and after adding another couple bags this evening, it will begin to be planted so the plants can establish good root systems before cold weather. The Rosemary and Thyme are in pots on the deck steps and they will be moved. Calendula plants in pots will be moved as it self seeds nicely, but seed will be gathered from the bed where Calendula is growing now to use if the transplants don’t provide seedling in spring. There are a few Echinacea plants that I started from seed this spring that can be added where the new bed has soil deep enough to plant in and some Rudbecia that has established by the garage will be divided and some of it added to the new bed. The upper flat area of the walled garden was under the old deck, it has had tons of rock piled on it for 15 years and is hard and compacted. Once the patio is finished and there is a solid edge to work against, I will work to deepen and enrich the soil there enough for planting. Until then, the half barrels of flowers that are currently not in the best locations will be settled in and kept planted with annuals for color. It is going to be an area to enjoy, an area to attract birds, eventually a place to prepare and enjoy outdoor meals.

    I will end today’s missive with a picture of the most gorgeous sky last evening as the preview always uses the last photo in my blog. It was beautiful to look at as I worked in the new garden and tended the evening chores, but enough cloud coverage to obscure any view of the comet later.

    Stay safe everyone. Wear a mask, it isn’t a political statement, it is a health and safely statement.

  • Successes and failures

    Basically, I consider this year’s garden a success. In pictures with captions.

    Many future tomatoes, all still green, two varieties, paste and slicers.
    Healthy peppers with blooms, basil, Chinese cabbage, and more tomatoes.
    Vigorous cucumbers, taking over.
    Lots of young cucumbers, this is the largest, just another day or two.
    Soft neck garlic and potato onions pulled to cure.
    With potato onions, you plant a single bulb and it produces clusters like this. The larger ones will be used as onions, the smallest will be replanted in fall for next year’s crop. I think I will plant some traditional onions next year too, most of these are under 2″ diameter.
    They will stay in the sun to cure for a couple of days then be brought in to the garage or wire shelves in the basement to finish curing, then their box that was not rebuilt in spring because it was already planted last fall will be rebuilt, given a load of compost and replanted with either beans or a fall vegetable in a month.
    While pulling weeds in the potato bed, I uprooted this little new potato. I didn’t dig for more, but it is hopeful that they are making potatoes under the leaves.

    Failures. The multiple plantings of corn have produced less than half of the stalks that should have grown. There may be some corn, but certainly not for what we had hoped. The experiment planting pepper and tomato seed directly produced nothing, nor did the direct sow of basil and dill. The two rows of Chinese cabbage that were planted after the peas were pulled did not germinate a single plant. Thus, now that the onions and garlic are pulled, there are two and a half 4 X 4 foot beds idle as well as the area where the mint was dug out and that box has still not been built and installed which will give me another 4 x 6 or 4 x 8 foot box. That is a lot of space that can be used to do a third planting of bush beans, some winter greens like spinach, fall peas, carrots perhaps. Anything planted now will need watering, we have reached the hot, dry period with occasional afternoon thunderstorms that are very hit or miss.

    When I rebuild the box and build the longer box, I think I am going to use corner posts at least 14-16″ so that heavy plastic can be laid over the bed to extend the growing season even after a light frost or two. We often have a frost then another period of mild to warm weather that would allow the harvest to be extended.

    More bean seed and some fall veggie seed were just ordered. As soon as it is appropriate, seed will be planted.

    While the pizza was baking and then after dinner, I moved and stacked the mini wall to help prevent erosion on the steep.

    Most of the stones are ordinary, but there are a few lovely dark purple gray and this one.

    Today we will buy another car load of Black Cow and at least toss the bags down on the hay before the afternoon storms begin. The hay men didn’t finish all that was already mowed, but have lined up 31 huge bales for picking up on the trailers and trucks. They will probably try to get the rest of what is mowed before the rain begins.

    The morning began with “Yogurt in a cooler.” It has been a while since I have made my own yogurt, having been buying a quart a week from the Natural foods store in town and having it curbside delivered with other food needs we can’t grow. But it is easy and cheaper to make my own. A half gallon of quality local milk that will make two quarts if I ate that much in a week, costs between $2 and $5 a quart less depending on which brand they put in my order. I have the jars, the cooler, and a supply of beach towels with which to wrap the cooler, so I am back to making my own.

    I also decided I was tired of trying to climb up in the coop several times a day to move eggs to nesting boxes to discourage the laying in the corner under the perch and encourage returning to the nesting boxes. I did a partial coop cleanout because the water inside the coop leaked and created a mess just inside the door and to open up two more nesting boxes. Three had been blocked off with the feeder and the water in front of them. By removing the water and just giving them water outside, two of the boxes could be reopened, that is 5 to choose from though when they use the boxes, it is never either of them. As I was working, the culprit that lays the first egg in the corner kept coming in and surveying her spot from which I had removed all of the straw. Fresh straw was put in the nesting boxes and 3 terra cotta flower pots were placed upside down in a row where she wanted to be. As I climbed back down out of the coop, she came right back in to the corner and this is what she found.

    Now she can use a nesting box or if she chooses to not, at least I can reach them from the pop door, or with a scoop from the main door. I’m curious what she will do.

  • A productive day

    After my post yesterday, I remembered 3 large boxes that I had stashed out of the way and was able to almost finish putting down the cardboard and hay. Today I will get a few more boxes from a source I reached out to yesterday and will spread the remaining bit of hay. Quite a few more rocks were moved in putting down those three boxes and two smaller ones I located. I uncovered several ant nests moving rocks and had to wait for them to move on before I could continue moving the stones.

    Only that narrow strip left to cover. From this angle you can see the plants from Iris left that need to be moved and the stone to the right of the piers that also need to be moved. What doesn’t go down on the edge of the cardboard will have to be relocated so I can get cardboard up to the edge of the piers. The patio rocks are all about 6 or more inches thick, so no wall needs to go across. I will use the small stuff to fill cracks and shim jiggly pavers, the larger ones used to fill in thin or low spots on the wall. The rest piled somewhere until we see if there is a need for them, maybe where the barrels are now on cardboard or weed mat to keep down the weed growth where the work hasn’t been done yet. I am excited that it is coming together a bit at a time.

    Much to our delight, the mowers arrived right after dinner and with two huge mowers and a smaller tractor with a tedder, they got everything mowed and teddered except for the big south hay field before dark. They will rake and bale tomorrow and probably get the south field mowed. I can now get my riding mower down near the berry patches and may yet get some berries for the freezer or for jam.

    It is a family affair. Both big tractors had husband, wife, and a kid on it, and the Dad to one man on the tedder.
    Tractors parked for the night.

    There is a very rocky area in the east field that I generally mow before the hay gets tall and didn’t get it done this year, so I will have to go over with the weed wacker and cut it down as they wisely mow around it. It could be cut with a sickle bar, but I don’t have one. If I had and knew how to use an old fashioned hay scythe, it could be saved as additional hay.

    Now to get some soil or leaf mulch down on the new bed, I can then move the plants and salvage some of the yellow iris to plant there as well. This fall I will plant the false indigo, move some comfrey, seed some calendula, and seek out some other dye plants to put in that bed. It will have an edible herb section, a medicinal herb section, and a dye section along with some ornamental perennial flowers. The half barrels will be moved, patio work done. I think the bird feeders will be moved out of that bed so I don’t get spilled seed volunteers in there, or maybe put down a tree ring covered with the smaller rocks that will discourage weed growth there. I won’t plant there anyway as there is a load of gravel right below the soil level where it stands. The lower single hook crook holds a suet feeder that doesn’t “shed” or maybe it will hold another Hummingbird feeder during the summer months, when I don’t put out seed for the birds.

  • Hot, Humid, Lazy Day

    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.

  • It only took 3 Days

    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.

  • We found summer

    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 that didn’t get away

    Last year about this time, grandson 1 came to spend part of the summer with us. He enjoys doing so because he gets to use the riding mower and drive the tractor, but he also has to help me with farm chores. He helped move some fencing, work in the garden, and just about anything I ask him to do. He cooks some as well and gets lessons and new recipes to add to his book of Grandmom’s Spells and Magic that he got for Christmas a couple of years ago, a loose leafed recipe book with cards that can be filled out and filed, all in my handwriting that my kids and he call a font that should be on the computer. He and I were about to start work on some project last summer when I looked in the egg door of the coop and a 6 foot long Black Rat Snake that I had seen outside of the coop about a week earlier was in one of the nesting boxes. It had gotten eggs the first time and had come back for more. I wasn’t going to have that happen, so without telling him why, I sent him to our tool area to get my leather garden gloves and an empty 5 gallon bucket with lid. When he returned with them, I had him open the egg door from the other end from the snake while I reached in and grabbed it behind it’s head and snatched it from the coop. His eyes got huge and his response was, “Grandmom, what kind of magic was that.” We put the snake in the bucket, put the lid on and he held it from falling over while I drove a bit more than a half a mile away to the woods and turned it loose.

    Well, because of COVID, he can’t visit this summer and I miss his help. This afternoon, I got the part of dinner that was going in the oven prepared and put in the oven and grabbed a basket to go gather peas and whatever eggs were under Miss Broody and when I opened the egg door, I spotted movement in an empty nesting box. I hurried back over to the house, grabbed the same gloves, a 5 gallon bucket with lid, and called up to hubby to grab his keys and his phone. He questioned why and I gave him a quick explanation as I dashed back to the coop, opened and hooked the egg door up and snatched this one out of the coop just as he arrived to snap a couple of pictures.

    Not as long as last year’s, this one was only about 5 feet and where the one last year was lethargic, this one was a writhing mess, trying to wrap around my arm. Once calmed down and picture taken, it was plopped in the bucket, lidded and back to the same spot the last one was taken. Last year, I had to dump the snake out of the bucket and it didn’t even move away very fast. As soon as I got the lid off today, it went over the rim and off into the woods. While there, I spotted these cool black mushrooms.

    I love mushrooms, but I would never gather them for food. Back home, the peas were picked and shelled in time to plunge them into boiling water for 3 minutes to enjoy with our dinner. The plants aren’t blooming anymore, but there are still many peas to pick, enjoy, and freeze.

    I would never kill a snake that wasn’t directly threatening me, the dogs, or a family member, but they don’t get to be in my coop and eat the eggs.

    Be safe. I wear a mask for your safely, please wear one for mine.