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Hi Everyone,
Last year I never got to plant one single sunflower seed. I wanted to—but I didn’t have the garden space and I’ve missed them greatly. I was thankful for one lone sunflower that came up from seed from the year before. That sunflower left seeds behind last year too, and once again it has returned. Flowers that go to seed and return year after a year are such a blessing—especially when time and space present a problem and I never get around to planting my own seeds. This year is a different story though. I have planted many rows and garden beds with zinnia and sunflower seeds. The gardens are full of zinnias and to my delight the first row of sunflowers is up and blooming. I planted another row a few weeks ago and they are already a couple inches tall. I am really enjoying the flowers this year—but not as much as I should be for I haven’t picked a single flower. Shame on me!
I promise you that keeping up with the gardens are truly a full time job—but it is not the only job we do around here so it is far from perfect. It is summer and the grasses are growing by leaps and bounds—and there is so much to mow. For starters there is the front and back yard, and then there is around the milking parlor, the milk house, the green house, the feed room and the brooder house. When we are processing the grass needs mowed around the poultry kitchen, and don’t forget the parking area. Then the grass in the garden area needs to be mowed. When the cows have eaten as much grass in a field as they can we move them to the next field—but they leave patches of tall grass here and there that has to be mowed down so that the grass in the whole field will stay fresh and not get rank. Cows like to eat tender grass—so if you do not mow down the tall patches the cows will not eat that section next time either or the next and they will just eat the shorter patches. The bulls occupy one field, and they get moved about once a week (it takes 3 bulls a long time to eat an area), then the heifers get moved two to three times a week. Mom mows behind the bulls and the heifers—plus all the other areas with the zero turn riding mower. Then there are the Jersey milk cows, the sheep and the beef cows. Sometimes they are scattered around the farm and sometimes they are following each other from field to field. Right now the grass is so tall and lush that we put the 25 or so Jersey cows in a two acre field for a few days, and then we move them to a new field and move the 60 to 70 sheep into that field, and then after a day or two we move the 30ish beef cows into the field. Once all the animals have grazed it then Papa mows these fields with the tractor and the bush hog before he moves the chickens into the field to scratch through all the cow manure and get rid of the fly larvae. I have to admit that my favorite grass season is early spring or late fall when the grass is short and green—no seed heads to stick to your clothes and make them stink, no wet grass up to your knees to make your skirts wet with dew, and a lot more time to do other projects. If we could afford it we could hire someone to do all the mowing and weed eaten—and it would be a full time job.
During mowing season I can have a hard time motivating myself to go to the garden—because I have no help. I am doing better at that this year and have found myself weeding and planting in the garden by myself many a day. Mom and Steve help when they can but they are usually so busy with the mowing and other projects that it isn’t as often as it is when there is no grass to mow. Last Monday I did get some help from Steve in the courtyard (after he picked up a lot of grass that Mom had mowed). Since the greenhouse was starting to be infested with mealybugs I decided to empty it. I had thrown away my roselle plants the Friday before, but on Monday I pulled up every strawberry plant and threw them away too. It wasn’t a real loss because they really didn’t do that grand this year. It took me two whole months to get around to planting them in the GreenStalk planters and they were so root bound that it took them a good five months before they actually started to grow and produce tiny strawberries. Back in February I had bought a tray of Pinks and a tray of Petunias—but they never got planted. They were still alive—but they were far from pretty. I also had two tubs of pink and yellow canna lilies from the garden that I salvaged one year when we dug up the elderberry from around the fish pond. Then I had a white climbing rose that we had bought a few years ago and two Peach Drift roses that Mom bought a few months back when we visited a garden nursery. That was all that was left in the greenhouse and I was determined to have them all planted and out of the greenhouse by Monday night. When I went to transplant the canna lilies into a big black tub near the milking parlor I ran into a slight problem—the tubs that they were in were housing an ant colony. UGH! So I set them aside and filled them with soapy water—the ants died, but I haven’t had another opportunity to replant them yet (but they are out of the greenhouse). The roses were planted in the courtyard at the house—but I had to dig out all the grass out of a new section before I could plant them—and that is where Steve came in to help. It was a VERY HOT day. The temperature was 103, and the heat index was 120! There wasn’t a lot of talking while we worked—for our focus was on coping with the heat. Mom and Papa were out to pasture working on the garden tunnels. It is July and they should be working on number three—according to Mom’s plans, but things never go as planned and number one is 90% done and number two is only 3% done.
It took me until Thursday to get some time to plant the petunias and the pinks in the garden. I had three rosemary plants that needed a home and we had just received two more climbing roses (Tangerine Skies) to go on the arbor in “Martha’s Vineyard.” I spent all afternoon in the garden. I had to dig the holes for the roses and mix together some dirt and manure compost to plant them in—and that was a wheelbarrow load. Once the roses where planted—which took 100% longer to actually do than it just took me to tell you, I then headed over to the Cottage Garden (raised beds) and planted the petunias in the bed with the tomatoes under the big oak tree. Then I used the left over potting mix from the roses to fill up the bed for the rosemary and the pinks. It was 5:00 by the time I finished planting everything and I practically crawled back to the house (thankfully by way of the Gravely) for I was so exhausted. It took me until 5:30 to get everything put away and cleaned up. When I got inside I wanted nothing more than a cool shower and a glass of lemonade, and to collapse on the sofa— but my eyes beheld the pots of yogurt milk that was ready to culture. Yes, in reality there was dinner to cook, yogurt to make, and chicken broth to bottle. So I grabbed a glass of lemonade, and then I made some meatloaf and put it in the oven before I ran for a shower. Once clean (but not refreshed) I made the yogurt and bottled the broth. By this time Mom and Papa were coming in from mowing and moving animals and were wondering when dinner would be ready. I could only honestly say that I had no idea beside—whenever it got done. So Papa went back outside to gather the eggs and feed the dogs their dinner. In the end dinner didn’t take much longer for all I had to do was open a jar of home canned potatoes and one of home canned green beans and heat them up and dinner was done. I had made some Roselle jello that morning, so we had some of it with our meatloaf, potatoes, and green beans.
To my delight I have managed to redeem some “time” of late and get some sewing done. The best part is that I finally have a pattern that fits Mom and so I can sew for her too. When we were done processing chickens on Friday Mom and I headed to town to run a few errands—and one of those places was Hobby Lobby where I hoped to find some material for a new dress for myself and some material for some new jumpers for Mom. Our mission was accomplished—but it was late when we got home. I was thankful for a leftover meatloaf (I always make two at a time), that I could heat up in some gravy and cook some white sweet potatoes for mashed potatoes and then I cooked some green peas and we had more jello—another quick and simple meal after a hard days labor and shopping (of which I do not know which is more tiring—shopping or farm work).
I had so much to do Saturday that I tried to use my time wisely. There were orders to pack, customers to take care of, sewing and ironing to do, piano to practice, okra that needed to be harvested and dinner to cook. I thought that after the orders were packed I would set a one hour timer to sew, and then I would come down and play the piano for about thirty minutes, and then I would iron for about an hour, and then do all the other things—BUT . . . A customer came and I took care of her. Then my timer went off but I hadn’t gotten as much accomplished as I had hope so I decided to stay another thirty minutes—during which another customer showed up. I decided to close up shop and iron once I was done with the customer, but I had forgotten to turn the AC back down (we store some veggies up in the sewing room), and I had left the money and receipt up there from the first customer—so I went back upstairs and decided to sew a little more until I had accomplished what I had set out to do. Shortly after 4:00 I came downstairs to iron, but Mom said that she wanted dinner done by 5:30. So I decided to iron until 4:30, fix dinner (Shepherd’s Pie with ground lamb) and then finish ironing while it baked in the oven. At least that went as planned! After dinner Papa needed me to help him separate the calves and then he dropped me off at the garden to harvest the okra and water the two roses. To my horror the two roses that I planted in the courtyard turned brown—at least their leaves did. I had forgotten all about them and they had not been watered since I had planted them on Monday—and it was a very hot week with little rain. Hopefully we found the problem before it was too late. Anyway, as I was walking through the garden I noticed that the deer had returned and eaten the sweet potato vines—that is the ones they could get to. The flower netting had helped protect some of the leaves. I told Mom that it would be nice if I could make a deal with the deer—they can eat all the sweet potato vines and leaves in the walkways, and I get to keep all the sweet potato vines in the garden beds! One sweet potato row did not have any flower netting over it and they really ate those leaves off. So I came up to the house grabbed some netting and some fence stakes and went back out to the garden and put it over the row of sweet potatoes. I do not like fighting deer—but I am determined to win this battle one way or the other. I know some people would love to do some hunting, but hunting season is many months away and I have to figure out how to outsmart them now. Papa reminded me of the peanut butter and hotwire trick tonight that an old farmer told me about a few years ago—and we just might have to try it.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare