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Hi Everyone,
It’s beginning to feel a lot like summer, everywhere we go. The sun is blazing hot, the weeds are growing strong, and the garden plants are growing bigger and bigger. It looks like the first thing we harvest from the spring garden might be a cantaloupe. The acorn squash is trailing right behind it. I am sure that once the summer squashes start to flower they will catch up real quickly. We have a few plants still left to transplant into the garden, but the only vegetable that we have left to plant is the sweet potatoes. Last Monday we began weeding the garden plot where we plan on planting the sweet potatoes. I wanted the chickens to weed it for me—and they actually spent six weeks in the bed working for us. This time though, we didn’t scatter the feed on the ground—which in turn meant that the chickens didn’t scratch very much through all the weeds. The last bed we did this in, we threw the feed on the ground and the chickens scratched the ground to get their food which caused all the weeds to be uprooted and eaten. Then when we took the chickens out of the bed so that we could plant—all the missed chicken feed sprouted and we had to tarp the bed for a week to kill the new sprouts. This time we thought that we would not throw the feed on the ground so that it wouldn’t sprout—but that meant the chickens didn’t scratch as much either. Therefore, we had to spend two whole days on our hands and knees weeding a 16 ft. x 32 ft. foot garden bed of large weeds—and nasty nut grass, Florida betony, and Bermuda grass (invasive weeds that are very hard to eradicate).You live and you learn. Experiment with things this way, and then that way. So now I know—put chickens in, scatter feed, remove chickens when the bed looks like dirt, tarp for one week, and then plant the garden in a weed free, labor easy garden bed. By 4:30 Tuesday afternoon we had finally gotten enough of the bed weeded so that we could make two rows and plant the white sweet potato slips that we had growing in the raised bed “nursery”. There was one problem though—it was time for Steve to go home for the day, and Papa had evening chores to do. That meant that we had no man power to haul a yard of compost from the truck to the garden beds. Therefore, Mom hauled the compost while I marked the beds and spread out the compost. Once the compost was spread out we broadforked the beds in order to loosen the soil and mix the compost in with the garden soil. Then we filled the walkways with wood chips. With the beds all prepared I went and dug up our sweet potatoes that were producing us with a nice supply of slips. We cut the slips one inch away from the potato in order to prevent any disease, and then we planted the slips about six inches in the ground. The two beds we made only held 42 sweet potato slips, and there were still more. So we decided to prepare the bed that we had just harvested white potatoes out of. That gave us room to plant 30 more sweet potato slips—making a total of 72 plants. Hopefully they will all root, produce a lot of potatoes, and the rats will not eat them all. We finished planting the sweet potatoes around 7:30, and then we had to finish attaching the tomatoes to the string that we had strung for them in the tunnel. It was around 8:00 that night before we headed inside to fix waffles for dinner.
Wednesday and Thursday we had little calves born. On Wednesday Analee had a bull calf, and on Thursday Emma had a little heifer calf. This was Analee’s fourth calf, but Emma’s first. Thankfully Emma was used to coming into the parlor to eat—but milking her for the first time was a different story. She kicked the wall, sat on the rope, kept trying to turn around, and even kept twisting my milking claws around her head. She at least let her milk down really well.
We spent all day Thursday in our beds—our garden beds that is. Some mowing was done, and a whole bunch of weeding. My two Aunts from Tennessee were coming for a visit, and it isn’t polite to take someone on a tour of your garden and get them covered in Spanish Needle seeds. I worked on removing the Spanish Needle from all the walkways, and by the time the end of the day arrived and I had pulled all the weeds that my energy and time would allow, my gloves and my socks looked like porcupines. I do not relish the idea of cleaning them up either. Mom focused on weeding the boxwood and white lily bed. The weeds had taken over it terribly, and the lilies were trying their best to bloom amidst the chaos. By the end of the day the bed was perfect and beautiful. The boxwood’s were hedged; the lilies were showing off their beauty without any competition, and the dirt was covered with mulch. It had undergone a complete transformation.
Friday morning we realized that our cow Analee was suffering from milk fever—she was producing so much milk that it was depleting her calcium. We called a vet out, and she came out early afternoon. While we waited for the vet, we had an egg packaging party with the Durmaz family. After the vet left we cleaned the house. We dusted the furniture, tidied up the bed, cleaned the bathroom and swept and mopped the floors—because the vacuum cleaners are broke. When it was as clean as we were going to get it, I grabbed an old water pitcher of my Grandma’s and headed to the garden to fill it with flowers. Nothing pleases me more than homemade gifts, home grown meals, and flower bouquets from our very own garden. I added about 20 more gladiolas this year, but would have gladly added about 100 more. They add the perfect touch to a flower bouquet. My Aunt’s arrived about 6:30, and although we had already started dinner—sweet potato fries and hamburgers, it was about 8:30 before we got to eat because we spent more time talking and looking at things than cooking.
Saturday started out like normal—sleep in until 7:00 (which was nice since we had been up until after 11:00), pancakes for breakfast, and then we had the cows to milk, orders to pack, vegetables to harvest, and receipts to finish. My Aunt’s had some shopping to do, so they were gone most of the morning. After lunch we headed to the garden for a garden tour. Then we came inside and I thought that all the extra hands would be just perfect for stripping all the leaves off the herbs that I had dried two weeks ago. The oregano, thyme, and peppermint all needed the leaves stripped off the stems. The parsley, sage, and comfrey just needed to be crumbled. I had hung the plantain in the van to dry, but the stems and the roots were not completely dry so I put them on the now empty trays and put them on the dehydrator to finish drying. Once the herbs were all packaged, we headed over to the drying shed and went through the onions. We wrapped the perfect ones in paper towels and put them in a crate in the sewing room—at 68 degrees. The ones that had a bad spot, or a little soft, or were doubles that will not store well, we brought into the house and we shall either eat them up quickly or cut them up and freeze them. It was 6:00 when we were done and it was time for dinner—one of our pasture raised chickens, a fresh garden salad with lettuce, carrots, radishes, and onion from our garden. Then I cooked some onions and carrots in butter seasoned with parsley, and I had some green peas. We have had a lovely visit with my Aunt’s. It is a shame that they have to go home tomorrow.
Last night we were blessed with a whole inch of rain—what a huge blessing for the grass has not been growing and the milk production has been getting lower and lower. I know that rain is in the forecast a lot this coming week—which will be great for milk and the garden. Hopefully we can stay on top of the weeds.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare