It’s been a grey, dreary day here. If we lived anywhere else, it would be a wintry day, or what we used to call a snow day when we lived up north. Except here in the south, it was mostly just rainy for a good portion of the day and overcast when the rain moved along. It was just one of those days where you want to curl up under a blanket with a good book. I sorted seeds and looked at some more seed catalogs (and worked) instead. And just to remind myself of what comes from all the hard work I put in on the ranch…
This was a late summer harvest – ok, it was in the latter part of October, but around here, that counts. I’m not able to munch on jalapenos like I used to, but that’s true of almost everything I grow around here.
There’s just something reassuring about being able to put up the fruits (and veggies) of your labor.
My sister and mom cleaned more stuff out of the garage today, toting it to the barn and arranging it. They also moved a bunch of dirt, a handful of pallets, and moved a triple stack of large stone pavers from one place to another. I was very impressed by their industry.
What was I doing? My “helper” (my nephew) and I were reconfiguring some of the 4×4 frames up in the front garden into 4×20 frames. Well, mostly, I was doing this, and my nephew was playing with the drill, or playing with the dog, or escaping to ride his tractor around the yard while yelling questions or commentary to me. Three – almost four – year olds do have short attention spans, much like the dogs, so it isn’t anything out of the ordinary, and he’s cute so there’s that. Having his “help” tends to slow down whatever is going on, but it’s good to have him around at this age, and enjoy him before he turns into a sullen teenager who would rather die than be caught hanging out with family.
In the end, the other team got much more done than we (I) did, but I did finish off that reconfiguration. One more down, and that’s good.
A check on the flats showed that the oregano has germinated quite nicely, and at least one of the stevia seeds has as well. Progress.
A sputtering, timid spit of rain is our net result from what began with such promise last night. Just a trace of the wet stuff, not enough to even register on the weather station’s gauge. The huge blob of clouds blew apart before reaching us. Since we have not as yet dug the trench to run irrigation back to the orchard area, that means wrangling hoses for me tomorrow in order to get the trees watered before they keel over from dehydration. On the plus side, no rain means I’m not hauling the four new servers to the NOC in a downpour.
We live (as I think I’ve mentioned) in the Bermuda Triangle of weather here. Common mythology says it rains every afternoon in Florida in the summer for a short while. In our corner of the county, the fronts and clouds and rain seem to break apart or skirt to the north or south of us, never quite reaching potential. There was a period last year where it didn’t rain for over a month here although it rained in areas around us. So when we look at the forecast, and it says 20% or 40% chance of rain for us, we plan on watering because the better chance is that it won’t rain on us. Things are looking up tonight and tomorrow, though: 60% tonight, 70% tomorrow. We may get lucky, and the trees back in the orchard will stop looking quite so sad and pathetic, and the garlic will be watered without me having to get the irrigation rerun on the reconfigured frames out front.
Two more flats started: habanero, jalapeno, two types of cayenne, tabasco, pepperoncino. Next up: more onions for our short days here.
I promised myself that this weekend would see at least one flat started in the (now clean) barn. Done: artichokes, lavender, stevia, and oregano went into this one. They’re settled in, the dome is on, and the lights are lowered to just above the top of the dome, set on a timer so I don’t have to remember to go out every evening to turn them off.
Last night while clicking around I found someone’s page about the exact, necessary steps to start pepper seeds. I agreed with some of the items, but disagreed with more, and closed it out, vowing to continue my method that according to this person should not work at all. The final seven plus pounds of peppers I took in just after the new year before the killing frost came tells me we must be on the right track.
More flats to come. Next weekend I’d like to start the tomatoes and peppers to get them going and be ready by March to get them out. I took a detour through the rear garden on my way back in, and despite what I’d hoped, the shelling peas did not survive the temperatures in the teens that we had. Those will need to come out, but that’s a good thing, as it means I can top those frames with some good topsoil and compost to have them ready for whatever will go in there next. Brassicas, I think. Today during football will be an ideal time to map out what goes where for spring planting.
The 2011 season has finally come to an end. Tonight and over the next couple of nights, we’ll be seeing hard freezes here in the country, so I went out late this afternoon and picked the remainder of the peppers, and cut some herbs in the event the plants can’t stand the chill.
The garlic will stay out through the winter and spring, and be fine bedded down with hay for the duration.
This is the main garlic area, and there are more frames off in the distance as well. It’s looking quite healthy, and planting it earlier in October seems to have paid off, with good growth prior to the onset of real winter, such as it is around here.
The final harvest from last year’s garden, although I’m hoping the herbs will pull themselves through.
Rosemary, oregano, marjoram, thyme, shelling peas, and a bunch of peppers. The oregano has already been picked, dried, and put away. The marjoram is currently drying after several rinses to get rid of the dirt – no crunchiness allowed. That will be next to be pulled and dried, followed by the rosemary. The only issue with pulling herbs is that the rosemary is so very strong my hands smell like pine trees now, even after several washes.
In a bit, it will be time to head out and turn on the taps at the remote areas where we have lines run to avoid any nasty surprises in the morning. I’m so happy that our really cold weather tends to be very brief in duration. I’m not a fan.
Bad blogger, bad! No posting on a regular basis, what is wrong with you?
Nothing wrong, just incredibly busy around here. Our season has lasted well into the winter, and we’re still harvesting peppers. The tomatoes that showed some promise going into fall succumbed to massive worm damage, so once again this year, like last, no tomatoes (although for wildly different reasons, given that last year it was a cancer of a different sort).
There’s a monarch butterfly chrysalis attached to the upended cooler by my garage, which is right near the butterfly bush I planted for the other monarch caterpillars that graced us with their presence before moving on to whatever secret place they chose to attach themselves. I’m hoping to capture it as it emerges, whenever that happens to be, and I have the plant cam set up on it.
My dreams have been invaded by images of paintings I’ve never seen hanging in galleries I’ve never visited (or heard of). My subconscious is probably trying to tell me something.
My puppy had to have the top part of one of his (non weight-bearing) toes amputated because he tore the nailbed right away from the bone on a ball-fetching excursion. It’s sad to me that he was in pain, but good that he’ll heal just fine and he’ll be right back to his duties.
The bees have been ordered, and should ship to us in May. We’ll be able to put these things to good use.
Most of this will be gone from the new barn when spring arrives, as they’ll be set up as homes for the three packages of bees (and queens) we’ll be receiving. Everyone is pretty excited about this, including me, and I’m looking forward to spring even more than usual.
Seeds for the new year were ordered and have arrived (mostly), and the next two weeks will be seed starting time in the small barn, under the lights – which I need to rerig for the pulley system I came up with to make things easier to wrangle under them. As with years past, we’ll be attempting a good variety of tomatoes to see what we like, or is we can just get any to maturity and get a harvest. This year will be better planned than previous years, to be sure.
The garlic went into the frames in late October, and is doing wonderfully thus far. By my estimate, I planted out over 2000 individual cloves this year, which will give us plenty to use and some to save as seed for next year’s planting season, I expect. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to sell some as well, since this is not the usual garlic found in grocery stores.
Here’s hoping the new year will be better than the previous years. Be sage, be happy.
Every year in this area, we have at least one fire. This past summer was no different, but this time around there were multiple fires and one about two miles away.
For the past few days, we’ve had smoke drifting in and hanging around from a fire on the Florida/Georgia border – and naturally, all the tropical storms/hurricane activity has bypassed us and it, and still it burns. Since there has been virtually no wind here at all, the smoke lingers well into the afternoon, making work outside challenging. But work needs to be done regardless of this, and yesterday was yet another highly productive day: various irrigation lines repaired and extended, mulch delivered and started to be spread, and the rear garden now receiving the same treatment as the front, with the fence partially pulled, plastic laid, and the fence reconfigured. Still much more to be done, but that is always the case on the ranch.
Yesterday, we had some additional labor on the ranch. Today, we did not – not much of a surprise, as the sheer physicality of much of what we do is not something that most people enjoy or can do, even if there is money involved. That’s fine: never underestimate girl power in the realm of Getting Things Done. Today we finished laying down the rest of the plastic around the front garden, reset the fence (and I added three more gates while we did this), started trenching for the edging around that, did finish the edging around the herb garden, weeded, hauled trash out, mowed, watered, cleaned up all the detritus and tools from our work, and generally worked from sunrise, took a break during the high temp hours, and continued until sunset. The moon rose as we put up the last of the tools.
It reminded me quite a bit of this.
Why? Because the females of the hive are the worker bees. That’s how it turned out for us today.
Speaking of bees, my sister and I will be taking a beekeeping course this Saturday, as I want to get things in motion to have bees next spring. I don’t each much honey straight off – I don’t drink tea any longer, and honey alone is a bit too acidic for my mouth – but I do a lot of cooking with honey, and other members of the family use honey on a regular basis, so I thought it would be cool to add that to the list of things we produce (or gather, as it may be) on the homestead. We would get the added benefit of having pollinators on the ranch so as not to have to rely so much on the incidental pollinators we get around here.
Butternut squash soup tonight for dinner, with onions and garlic right from the ranch. It will be just as good tomorrow for breakfast before diving back into the work that never ends.
