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Hi Everyone,
I remember the first morning when we first moved into our farmhouse 27 years ago. It was in October and the air was crisp, and that morning was bright and as we ate breakfast we heard the honking of wild geese flying over the house heading for our little pond. They flew in every morning, and flew out every evening. For years those geese came and went. I remember when we enlarged the pond, and the water was clean, we actually managed to go swimming with the geese—they were on one side of the pond and we were on the other. Anyway, that first morning felt like we had spent the night in a fancy Bed and Breakfast in some beautiful countryside. Yesterday morning as we ate breakfast we had another kind of wild guest. From our dining room windows we could see across the fields to our neighbor’s pasture where two does and two fawns were grazing and keeping a close eye on the neighbor’s cows. Deer are not strangers to our farm, and when it comes to the garden they are not my favorite friends, but I have to admit that it was really neat to watch them enjoy their breakfast while I enjoyed mine.
“A lot can happen in a week”—are the words of one of our local customers who came by Saturday afternoon to pick up her order. The week before our new barn was nothing more than a concrete slab with an open pole barn over it. By Thursday you could see every room in the new barn layout. The builders had spent the week framing up the walls and putting up the metal soffits around the barn. We now know just how big the new Milk House and Feed Room will be. We know where the storage room and new walk-in cooler will be, and just how much room there will be in the bathroom. In order to get “inside” the new barn you have to walk through the door openings, because the outside “studs” go horizontal. We can see where the windows will be. Once inside we can still walk through the walls because those studs are vertical. The builders told us that by next Thursday the whole barn should be wrapped in metal. Then the plumbers and electricians can come in and do their work before the inside walls are covered. I took a little “short” video tour of the skeleton of a barn and you can tour the barn with me by clicking HERE!
I am greatly enjoying my garden help. I am always amazed at how much more can get done with two people—especially when one is extra strong. Monday I weeded in the West Garden, and Jessie mowed “Martha’s Vineyard” and we both got the Tangerine Skies roses composted and mulched. The poor things have been so neglected that they are just as puny as the day we received them in the mail. Maybe they will do better now that they got a little TLC. Tuesday we weeded in the Cottage Garden—well I weeded and let Jessie do some demo work. The wooden stand that housed our old antique garden sink rotted, and Mama is in the slow process of moving it to the garage. The rotten stand still halfway stood in the garden and since we have a large dumpster on the property for the construction crew I decided that it was a good time to do some garden cleanup. There are rotten trellises dotted here and there in the garden—and Jessie loves demo, so I figured that he would greatly enjoy the cleanup—and he did! He didn’t get to all the trellises, because we ran out of time and some will require the tractor to pull them down out of the vines or wild trees that have taken over. My goal for Thursday was to plant some sweet potatoes. I have tried to grow white sweet potatoes many times—but have not had much success. So this year I only ordered 12 plants, and decided to try a different method. Mama had seen on YouTube where a person grew sweet potatoes in three feet of mulch, and only put soil in the spot where she planted the sweet potato slip. For months I have wracked my brain trying to figure out just where I could make a bed that was three feet deep with wood chips—and in a deer proof section of the garden. Come Thursday morning Mama suggested that I just plant them the way we had and where I did last year—but I had already planted okra and cosmos in three of those beds. I had one skinny bed left, and since I only had 10 slips I decided to plant them there. Then my brain began to start getting ideas. In the barn we have a whole stash of vinyl panels left over from doing the porch ceiling on our house. We use them for all kinds of crazy ideas. This time I wanted to use them to make a short wall so that I could get at least a foot of woodchips on the bed where I wanted to plant the sweet potato slips. When I got to the garden bed I caught sight of the two trellises where I had grown sugar snap peas back in the spring. I knew that some people allow their sweet potato vines to grow up trellises, and each trellis was big enough to grow five sweet potato plants—so Jessie and I made our little vinyl boxes by attaching the panels to the trellis and the rebar spikes with some zip ties. Then we filled the boxes up with woodchips and I made five little bowls in each bed and filled them with the compost we bought for the Market Gardens and then I planted the sweet potato slips. To my delight it poured down rain that night—but come to think of it I haven’t watered the baby plants since. I hope that they are surviving! Well, I am grateful for long days—for it’s now 8:50 at night and I just ran outside to check on them. To my delight 8 out of 10 are doing great. The other two may survive, but if not I may be able to replace them. Time will tell.
Before we ever got to the garden Thursday we first stopped to do some major tree trimming. I was driving the tractor out to the garden with a bucket load of woodchips when I saw some tall patches of grass under some tree branches that were almost hanging down to the ground. Mama was out mowing, but was running into some difficulty with an over grown oak tree. So I parked the tractor in the lane and got in the Gravely with Jessie and we headed back to the house for some tree pruners. We then spent the next 30 minutes to an hour trimming up the oak tree. They say that if you prune a tree at the beginning of summer it will not grow back as fast—so hopefully those branches will stay up in the air for many years before they hang down low again and we have to prune them again. We can drive under the tree again, which is nice. Hopefully this week Jessie and I can get the other half of the tree pruned—the half that hangs over the garden and is hanging so low that you have to dodge the branches and duck under them in the walkways.
I planted the last of my basil seeds back in the spring—but none of them sprouted. Then it took me a few months to finally get around to ordering some new seeds. Then it took me a few more weeks to finally get them planted. Thursday morning after I milked the cows I worked in the greenhouse. I planted the basil—cinnamon basil, which is my favorite flavor. Then I cleaned up all the seed trays and pots that were still full of dirt from my spring planting. I dumped the used dirt out and then rinsed out all the trays and pots. The only thing still growing in the green house are a few plants Mama got from Lowe’s—but hasn’t gotten around to planting them, and the strawberries in the GreenStalk planters. Hopefully the basil will sprout soon.
Friday was chicken Graduation day on the farm. We had 64 chickens to process, and still no help. We have had a person here and there say that they would love to help—but we are really looking for a family that would like to swap help for a few large chickens. We were grateful for Jessie’s help. He didn’t get to stay to the end, but at least he was here long enough to get all the chickens out of the ice bath, weighed and sorted. Some were packaged right away, and some were put into another ice bath waiting to be cut up into parts. Jessie enjoyed guesstimating how much each chicken weighed before he put it on the scale—and the more he did the better he got at his guessing. Jessie left around 5:45, just when I was finally able to start cutting up the 24 chickens. The chickens were all cut up, packaged, labeled and in the freezer by 8:00. It was 8:30 by the time we were finished with cleanup and could head inside to cook some frozen pizzas for dinner.
Saturday was spent recuperating and getting a little bit of house work done and Mama got some mowing done—but truthfully we didn’t feel like doing anything! I am sure by tomorrow we shall be ready to see what all we can accomplish.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare