The Farm

This is The Farm or as I usually call it, “The South 40.” It is indeed south but not quite 40 acres. However a lot more space than we really need. I’m not sure what we will do with all of it. This view is from our patio.

Has it really been almost 3 weeks? Well, you know the old saying about how “time is what prevents everything from happening at once.” You don’t remember that one? Some wise person thought it up and then wrote it down. But I digress. It has been a good three weeks. We have done what we always do so let’s take a shortcut. Read one of the other blogs and you’ll have it. The end. Good bye. See you next time.

Oh, you wanted more. I can do that. I’ll tell you about our delve into gardening. Several weeks ago Ginger bought two potting trays. Each one had 24 little tiny cloth pots of something similar to peat – they expanded when wet. I wanted to get an early start on our garden (last year it was June before we planted anything) and I didn’t know how long seeds would take to grow. So…

I bought a few packets of seeds, watered the peat, watched it expand and then planted seeds. All kinds of seeds – peas, beans, corn, zucchini, a different kind of zucchini, acorn squash, hubbard squash, summer squash, cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, radishes, lettuce, and maybe a few other things. This was about Easter – maybe a little later. I kept the things covered with the plastic lid, kept them watered, put them in the light by the window, watched the moisture form on the lid, and sure enough they began to grow. And grow. And grow. I didn’t know they would sprout like that. I think the soil had a growth additive! We didn’t have the garden ready. It was raining. It was kind of cold. Too soon to plant outdoors. But roots were coming out the sides of the cloth pots, the beans were 6 inches high, the corn about the same. Peas were vining over the side of the table and heading toward the floor. This wasn’t good. They needed something bigger. So we bought the larger 4 inch peat pots and Joyce transplanted the big ones.

All to no avail. By the time the garden was ready the plants had outgrown themselves. The stalks were very spindly and couldn’t hold the weight of the plant and apparently couldn’t let enough nutrients pass through. They died. Oh well, we had lots of seeds (do you realize how many zucchini you could harvest from one package of seeds?!!). We planted again. This time the plants were ready the same time as the garden. And they made it into the ground. A side note here: the carrots, radishes, lettuce, and cauliflower didn’t respond to the starting pots. When we planted the garden their seeds were put into the ground. Same with the peas. And all are doing well. Take a look

I built one more raised bed this spring so we have four. They are 4 feet by 8 feet. I’m sure we have some things planted too close together, but oh well. The wimpy looking things in the closest bed are onion starts.

The tomatoes and corn are in the ground at the east side of the South 40. There are five tomato plants and about 24 corn hills. The corn is an experiment to see if it will really produce anything. I welcome any hints.

We got some squash and the tomatoes from a friend. We bought the cabbage plants and a cucumber.

The dark line in the middle right is where the raspberries will go. My blueberries will also go in here somewhere. All the dirt in the foreground is “extra” land. I don’t know what we will do with it.

Our biggest problem is that this is the dirt dug out from where Ginger’s house is and it is full of clay. I have tilled enriched top soil into it and will keep doing that each year but for now, there might be too much clay – especially for the tomatoes and corn. The raised beds are in pretty good shape.

I finally got a compost box built. I couldn’t find any pallets (four of them make a nice box) so I used the scrap stuff I had. I know the plywood won’t  last for very many years but it will do for awhile. I cut holes in it for air circulation. The large board at the bottom comes out to turn the stuff over and to get at the composted dirt.

If all this stuff grows and produces please come and take some. Please! PLEASE!! We’ll be overtaken by garden produce. The project I’m working on now is getting irrigation to all this so we don’t have to drag a hose around.

Depending on where you live you might be aware that we have had over two weeks of summer-like weather. A few days were even into the 80s. Monday it is supposed to rain and then back to sunny weather. No one knows (but everyone is prognosticating) what this means for later spring and summer. It will, no doubt, be a bad fire season.

So to close, here is one last picture. This is my mom’s wash tubs. I remember they were set up by the washing machine either in the kitchen or on the back porch. Mom (when I was older she let me do it) would run the washed clothes through the wringer and into the first tub of fresh rinse water. They would be swooshed around by hand and then the wringer would swing over above the divider and the clothes would go from tub one to the second rinse. Then, one more wringing into the basket and off to the clothes line.