Why scream when it isn’t necessary?
Homemade ice cream sandwiches, from top to bottom: the perfect summer treat.
Three weeks
One day shy of three weeks ago.
And now.
Peace in the garden
Doesn’t this look like a peaceful scene? Somewhere you could walk out, take a deep breath, enjoy the promise of future tomatoes? All of these are sungolds, a mighty tasty cherry-type tomato.
But evil lurks within that peaceful scene. Can you see it? A closeup might help.
Those are hornworms. Left to their own devices, they can wipe out entire plants in no time.
We pulled about two dozen off the sungolds. I was getting a bit creeped out by squishing them, so we started dropping them into this flat instead.
I’m aware that critters need to eat. But these critters do not belong on these plants. No way.
Since we don’t use the commercial pesticides, and I wasn’t about to grind down on these things any further, there was only one thing to do.
In mythology, fire is often seen as a cleansing device. That’s how I viewed this.
Fortunately, although they did quite a bit of damage…
…the plants are mature and resilient.
We’re still waiting for the first ripe fruit. Patience. Patience.
Good day
Almost any day is a good day in the garden, to be honest. The sun, the breeze, the dirt ground into the lines of your hand that won’t come out for days, accidentally leaning into an anthill, the sweat dripping down your brow into your eyeball and stinging – it’s all good. Because when you come right down to it, you have to ask yourself: is what you do while you’re out there worth all the toil you put into it?
People have a variety of reasons for gardening. For some, it’s a reminder of when they were younger and their parents (or grandparents) had gardens they tended: a mixture of family tradition and nostalgia. For some, it’s about self-sufficiency and about being kind to the environment. For others, it’s about eating local – incredibly local – and feeding others. And for most, it seems, it’s some kind of combination of all of those things, to varying degrees.
I know it is for me, anyway.
They call the wind Mariah
Me, I just call it a bitch. Not the light wind that swirls around, keeping the air moving, drying the sweat off you while you’re working outside. That’s a welcome breeze, sometimes carrying the hint of rain in the distance.
No, I mean the 30 MPH sustained wind that gusts to 45-50 MPH, changing direction entirely at random, snapping the plants back and forth, blowing dirt and dust around, and pushing any hope of rain away from our area. When it lasts, literally, all day, for close to 12 hours, it causes stems to break off, some younger tomato plants to be almost uprooted entirely, and blows other things right off their trellis. Like this.
Since they’re about to end their production anyway, I decided to try to prop up the battered plants instead of just leaving them lie and harvest whatever I could over the next week before taking them all out. That day’s haul:
Some of this was used in a stirfry that very evening, and the rest went to the freezer. In the grocery store today, I saw that Publix had snow peas. From Guatemala, at 4.99/pound. Good thing we grew our own.
We also finished up the planting of the front corn plot (four rows x 25 feet of Japanese hulless popcorn) and the back plot:
Eleven rows x 35 feet of Silver Queen. In total, we have planted about 1400 kernels of corn. That should be something to see if it all comes up and survives. The soil is so iffy that I’m not holding my breath over it and not expecting a lot, but naturally I’ll still try to baby it through.
Mother’s Day dinner, for mom and for our newest mom in the family: shrimp two ways, salad, rice, asparagus, broccoli and cheese stuffed chicken breasts.
Future wine
Perhaps not.
These are a variety called Pink Reliance. Last year, I ordered a stem, we picked a spot on the eastern side of the property, laid it in, ran a rudimentary trellis, and then figured it probably would die either because of the soil or during one of our infrequent freezes over the winter.
It didn’t. After the frosts ended, we walked out one morning and noticed all sorts of green leaves coming back on the bare stem. Soon after, tiny clusters of grapes appeared, and they’re now moving in to about half an inch in diameter. This after we didn’t do much of anything to protect it after it was planted.
The next project is to build a proper trellis, since it seems intent on being a healthy plant after all. We picked up a couple of 4x4x8 end posts and some galvanized wire for what I hope will be many years of production.
First
The first blackberry of the season, which I found in my morning scouting.
The first “happy blackberry eating face” of the season.
Watching it grow
Experiments
Last year’s corn experiment was derailed by various things, including either a dog or a deer crashing through the plot. We’ll be redoing that plot again this year, but decided to also try a little experiment.
These frames were set and then seeded on April 20. The photo above is from May 4. So far, so good. These frames were placed in an area where I had planted watermelon and canteloupe last year. We didn’t get anything from those plantings, although there were several watermelons that showed up to get chewed by the ants. We left the fruits and the plants to die off in that area, because as everyone who reads this knows, the soil can use all the help it can get.
Given that, I expected to see some volunteer watermelons show up this year. What I did not expect was to count 41 of them between the frames, and two in the frame above – how they got there, I’ll never know. Most or all of these will need to be relocated, as we’ll need the space between the frames to walk. What we’ll do with all this watermelon, assuming any of it comes in, I don’t know, but I’m sure the people and the animals around here (including the chickens) will take care of a good portion of it.
I’ve also decided to plant part of the front of the property in corn. We’re going to till up a plot in the front and put in a variety called maple sweet. It’s also highly likely that we’ll be putting frames around the front of the property. This all occurred to me as I was cutting the grass at the road side of the property, and before I ran out of gas in the tractor along the fenceline. I don’t mind using the tractor to mow, but growing cool stuff to eat is much more fun and if we ever go the CSA route – something we’ve been discussing more seriously than “one day, we should…” – we’ll have areas already started to hold more goodies.
Going to be a busy season around here. I’m already thinking ahead to winter (greenhouse, wiring the barn for seeding racks, keeping the chickens warm, and so on) and next year (bees, hopefully). I’m also thinking about tomorrow, which will find me at the dentist having two crowns put in my face. No doubt I will not be as chipper as usual after that particular activity, although I hope to be in minor enough pain that I can single line trellis the sungold tomatoes, which are beginning to fruit and need a bit of support.
Life on Lazy Dog Ranch.
Greening up
Spring has been a busy time here at the ranch. That’s understandable, given that our growing season starts early, and we’ve been working to get things in shape to actually grow things this year rather than struggling with the soil, such as it is, which will take years for me to build up organically.
We had started off with a couple of rows of frames: getting them built, filled, and planted. March 19:
The front of that frame second from the right has the snow peas, along with carrots and some herbs. We were still in the process of mixing and filling the built frames and putting together more.
As of early April, the peas were starting to take off – as was everything else, in fact, given the much healthier soil. April 2:
In mid-April on one weekend, my brother and his son built the rest of the frames out for me while I prepped the area that would hold our experimental frames for corn. The already-planted items continued to fare very well. April 13:
I laid down weedblock in the new frames and my brothers finished filling them while I was at the NOC one day. The snow peas were finally at the point where they needed to be picked (past due, really). The catnip had gone bonkers and I did a little massacre on it (it has not seemed to care much), and I pulled the entire bunch of thyme up and dried it, then planted new from seed in the same square from which I had pulled it. The carrots are doing incredibly well – that is the frilly green stuff on the right, and in the front is several basil plants. April 27:
The first snowpea harvest, steamed that very evening.
The other things that have been planted/transplanted in have taken off with the warmer weather, regular watering, and available nutrients. May 4:
The snow peas continue to be productive, and need to be picked again tomorrow.
The additional strings running from the frame to the right are for runners that refused to go up the trellis. Since it’s difficult to get the plants to cooperate in one fashion, I’ve given them another direction to run so they’ll continue to put out pods without lying on the ground. The only other issue we’re having at the moment is a good one to have: the peas are climbing higher than I set the trellis. Next time we’ll know that just over five feet is not quite enough.
This is a front view of the frame with the snow peas, carrots, basil, catnip, and lavender.
More to come as things keep growing along.