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Hi Everyone,
Last night was the Harvest Full Moon. It was so bright when I went to bed at 9:30, and it was just as bright when I went outside this morning to milk the cows at 5:30. I have read that the reason they call it the harvest moon is because it is so bright that people can continue to harvest clear into the wee hours of the night—working hard to get the harvest in before the first frost. Living here in Florida it is very hard to comprehend a fall harvest in September, for that is when we begin our gardens. The only harvesting that we do in the fall is lemongrass, Roselle hibiscus, and sweet potatoes—my favorite!
Yes, September is the time to begin planting carrots, cabbages, kale, collards, onions, garlic, beets, lettuce, broccoli, strawberries, and any other lovely green you like. This year I have decided to try a new method of planting—but I am finding myself quite naive about it. It is definitely a learning curve. Instead of planting the seeds right into the ground like we always have, we decided to try transplanting so that we do not have to rescue our seedlings from weeds. The other idea about doing transplants is that you can get a head start on the planting season. Our first attempt at planting in the seed trays produced some very spindly looking seedlings. They went from under the dirt, to three inches high in just twelve hours—that should take a week or more. As to getting a head start—well I haven’t got my brain into a plan a head mode. When the date arrives to plant the seeds in the ground, that is when I think about planting my seeds in the tray—but I should already have plants ready to transplant into the ground. Solving that problem requires some calendar planning, but solving the spindly seedlings required a phone call to Noah—a friend who runs Swallowtail Farms in Alachua, FL. There he maintains a large CSA garden. I figured if he does it for a living, he should have the answers that I need. So Monday morning I called him and told him about my problem. Noah said that the solution was very easy—all I needed was a greenhouse, and since we build hoop houses for our chickens, all we had to do was cover one with greenhouse plastic. Simple solution—right? We began to brainstorm, and realized that we had a 17ft long by 9ft wide hoop house that we were not using. The next question to answer was where to put our new greenhouse. I knew that we didn’t want to kill any grass in the yard, and since we would be transplanting them to the garden, why not put the greenhouse in the garden—but where? Then I thought about this one section of the garden that we haven’t been able to tame yet. There are two 10’ by 10’ boxes there. One had terribly invasive weeds in it years ago that we dug all the dirt out of it, and dumped it in the other 10’ by 10’ behind it. Then we never got around to filling it up with good weed free dirt. The dirt that was left began to grow weeds again, and the other bed was now a mountain of weeds. I thought that we could just go in there, clear out all the weeds, get rid of the boxes—for they are rotten now anyway, level it all out, frame it with some railroad ties and put our greenhouse there. Mom was in total agreement, and as soon as lunch was over we headed to the garden. Papa and Steve were busy moving sheep, chickens, and cows to new pastures, but they soon joined us. When Mom and I got to the garden spot it was a bigger job than I had anticipated—but not willing to be too easily discouraged we began to pull weeds. Those weeds created a solid wall that was a good six or more feet tall. Every square inch of dirt housed a large weed the diameter of one of my fingers. There was golden rod, Spanish needle, and to our poor hands dismay—blackberry briars. When Papa arrived to help he asked what we were doing. I cheerfully told him that we were weeding. He wanted to know why this section and I cheerfully told him because Noah said that we needed a greenhouse and we were going to convert the unused large hoop house into a greenhouse and park it right in this spot. His eyes questioned my sanity, but he headed to the house to get the hay wagon so that he and Steve could load the mountain of weeds onto it and take it to the compost heap. For about two hours we pulled weeds—and we got out just about every big weed in there. We were exhausted, hot, soaked with sweat and ready for some kombucha. Quitting time is usually 4:30, but we quit early and Steve was heading home by 4:00. I hated to quit, but with the temperature 98 and the heat index 108, it was too hot. After I got refreshed I headed back outside to bring the hoop house up into the yard so that we could get the old tarp off, and do a few repairs on it. Then I came inside and Mom and I began to brainstorm the greenhouse idea. I wanted to frame the bottom of it with railroad ties, but we didn’t have enough. As we researched where to buy some more, we were reminded that railroad ties are toxic, and are illegal to use in landscaping—so tell me, why do they sell them? We also realized that the hoop house was only 17ft long, but the space that it would be occupying is 23ft long. We needed a new design. Papa reminded us of the 16 or 18 glass doors that we bought a few years ago with the idea of building a greenhouse with them. We had planned on building the glasshouse in a 10 by 10, but we couldn’t figure out how to make it fit. With some greenhouse plastic panels and the doors, it should be no problem designing a greenhouse to fill the 10ft by 23ft area in the back of the garden.
When I woke up Tuesday morning I realized that the garden greenhouse was not going to be a reality anytime soon, but I needed a greenhouse for the six seed trays that were quickly sprouting. We decided to use the long hoop house and put it on our concrete pad in front of our garage. It is right next to a water hose and in our pathway as we go in and out of the house—we can keep a good eye on the sprouts now. So, as soon as we had milked the cows and bottled the milk we began to transform the hoop house from a chicken house to a greenhouse. We drug it up onto the concrete and then we took off the tarp and we took out the roosts and the frame for the nesting boxes. We grabbed the old plastic covering from our caterpillar tunnel that was cut all up when the little tornado hit it, and rolled it out to find a section with very few holes in it. Then we attached it to the hoop house, placed some saw horses inside and topped them with one of our onion drying racks. Next we gathered up the seed trays and put a small piece of shade cloth over the section where the seeds were so that they didn’t get too hot. Our greenhouse was officially done.
Thursday and Friday were both good days to replant the vegetables whose seeds has sprouted and grown spindly, but Thursday was full to the brim with milking the cows and then processing 44 meat chickens. As always, with just the three of us it is an all afternoon process. I put it on the “To Do List”, but Papa just laughed and asked when I thought that I would have time to do that. Come Friday though, as soon as milking and bottling was done Mom and I grabbed the basket of seeds and entered the greenhouse and put more seeds in all the empty holes. The Swiss chard and the bunching onions win the award for doing the best, one of the cabbage varieties and the lettuce say that it is too hot to sprout. Some of the lettuce did sprout when I had them in the milk house at 73 degrees, but they wilted the day I put them on the railing of the front porch. Once the seeds were all planted, we ate lunch and then we packaged all the chickens and got them to the freezer. We finished about 5:00 and we had to quickly head to the bank before it closed, and we needed to get some groceries.
Last Friday when we went shopping I met a lady in the grocery store aisle. Three months ago she and her husband moved up to the country from a big city down south. Sue was so excited to learn that I lived on a farm and that we had a garden. They had a really nice garden back in the city, and were looking for a “new playground”, because they really didn’t want as big of a garden anymore—but they love gardening. So, yesterday Sue and Leo came up to visit our farm—and see our garden. The garden isn’t the prettiest to see at the end of the summer. The weeds are so big and are taking over everything. It doesn’t help that we haven’t been able to get around to mowing the grass either. The good news is that they gardened using the very same method that we are trying to use—so we have found us some good garden mentors. After we toured the garden, we all hopped in the Gravely and headed out to pasture to do the evening chores. We gathered the eggs, and gave Sheba lots of loving. Next we went up to see the beef cows and munch on some chestnuts that are now falling. Then we headed up to the Jersey cows to bring Penelope down to feed her calves, and to separate three of the calves so that we can share milk with them. If we leave the calves on their mamas, they drink all of the milk—leaving us none; but if we separate them, the mamma gives us some milk, and saves some for her calf. Friday night Penny had a little bull calf, and Sue wanted to see it—but he was off hiding in the two foot tall grasses. We walked through the grasses for about fifteen minutes looking for him—and Mom finally found him all curled up at the bottom of some tall grass. He was perfectly content to be hiding.
Last week was quite crazy—and very busy. Not too sure what this week will behold, but the To Do List is pretty long, but I do not believe that there is enough hours in our days, or strength in our bodies to accomplish all of it this week.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare