What Did You Do In The Garden?

[flowerbug]

i got out for a few hours of digging at the top of the north garden to start reshaping and transplanting creeping thyme to help split and divert the flow of water that keeps coming in from the top. with what i've done today i'll need to see the results of a heavy rain to find out if it is enough or not, but at least i got the first round done. my body sure feels much better after getting a few hours of dirt therapy in too.

before i got into the dirt i cleaned up the garlic that has cured and so i can break some bulbs up for replanting and also for putting any extra bulbs into dark storage. i found out last year that wrapping them in towels and then leaving them in the garage all winter doesn't bother them a bit, they'll keep until late winter if we don't eat them all by then they'll start sprouting a little but they won't rot because they're wrapped in something dry that lets extra moisture out.

picked a handful of dry beans that were ready.

 

[Zeedman]

Yes, garlic planting time is approaching. I have to make a point of moving & starting the raised bed for the garlic this week, while the soil is fairly dry. No telling if it will get too wet later.

We started harvesting the peppers at home. They did very well, which almost makes up for the poor pepper yield in the rural garden.

Elephant's Ear, six plants. A sweet pepper with thick walls; as heavy as bells, but more reliable. DW & I will eat many of them, freeze some for winter, and give some to family & friends.

Trinidad Perfume... looks hot, but its not. Not really sweet either, the closest thing I could compare their flavor to would be orange peel. Crunchy & pleasant. They were planted in partial shade this year (North side of a pole bean trellis) and seem to like those conditions, this is by far the best yield I've had from them.

The soybean harvest continues... only 3 varieties remain. For the most part, after a few days of drying the bushes indoors, DW & I are keeping up with shelling them. Beans are done, but cowpeas still continue to flower & set pods. The second set for MN 13 has begun drying down, which should add significantly to its overall yield.

I opened & scooped out about 1/2 of the seed cucumbers for WI 5207 today. The seed/juice will be fermented for a few days to allow the gel sacs to separate from the seed. The process is very similar to the fermentation & float-off used to process tomato seed.

The Liso Calcutta gherkins left for seed are taking longer to ripen than the cukes. I have been selecting for fewer spines, and these are nearly smooth. That is both promising & frustrating, since those gherkins are the only thing preventing me from mowing & tilling about 1/4 of the rural garden.

 

[flowerbug]

went out with a plan this morning. there was a cedar tree planted near the pathway back to the garden that had been overgrowing the pathway for years and each year i kept telling myself that i should trim it back, but of course it didn't get done. until this morning. now at least we can walk down the path without having to walk partway into the neighboring edge of decorations, and perhaps i won't keep knocking them over with buckets i'm carrying as i go by now.

cedar trees make a lot of mulch for themselves. i have a nice pile of it to bury in a garden that can use a bit more height for perching things above the grade for better drainage.

i then went out and scanned some gardens for dry beans that were ready to be picked. not much ready that i could bring in but some here or there.

 

[Prairie Rose]

I went out and looked at the weed patch previously known as my garden and made a list. The humidity has broken here, but it is still hot to be working out in the sun. I plan on starting my list this weekend, after the temperatures drop! I may be moving before the end of the year, but I am going to put the garden to bed just in case I am still here in the spring!

 

[flowerbug]

part two of today was getting back into the north garden to start cleaning up the bean plants, weeds and other debris that have been there for a while and when i finished one round of that i had the choice of doing more or moving more Creeping Thyme to get it going around all of the edges - so i did that instead - watered it all in and that was enough for today. it was warm enough out there for me to work up a little sweat but not so bad that i was overheating.

i still have more Creeping Thyme to move to help fill in a slope faster (the more i have growing the fewer weeds i'll have to pull out of there), but that will be for another day...

i found a few small patches of Irish Moss growing in the Creeping Thyme near where the previous small patch of IM had been. i moved those two patches so they can be closer to the other patch. it really doesn't seem to mind growing in the Creeping Thyme so it will be fun to play with these new patches a bit more than what i've been doing so far (which is keeping the Creeping Thyme from overgrowing the Irish Moss). it was interesting to me too that i did not notice either of these two patches before because when i'm weeding i'm pretty close to the ground and near-sighted enough that without glasses i might have my nose really close too.

the guy who farms the field to the west of us across the road is out there harvesting his soybeans. the breeze is not blowing this way so that is really nice. it is not often the wind doesn't come from the SW.

 

[Zeedman]

the guy who farms the field to the west of us across the road is out there harvesting his soybeans. the breeze is not blowing this way so that is really nice. it is not often the wind doesn't come from the SW.

Good thing you were upwind - mechanical soybean harvest can throw up quite a dust cloud.

The farm fields near my rural garden are seldom planted in soybeans (corn & alfalfa this year). So I don't have to deal with dust... but immediately after harvest, trucks from the nearby dairy mega-farm spray liquid manure on the fields. They must have a large fleet; truck after truck after truck - and usually upwind. There were a couple times where DW & I drove out to the garden, found that the odor was too strong for us, and resolved to come back after the smell died down.

 

[flowerbug]

Good thing you were upwind - mechanical soybean harvest can throw up quite a dust cloud.

usually it is corn or soybeans. corn can be a mess too but Mom is the only one annoyed by that. i just run over it with the lawn-mower and let the worms figure it out.

The farm fields near my rural garden are seldom planted in soybeans (corn & alfalfa this year). So I don't have to deal with dust... but immediately after harvest, trucks from the nearby dairy mega-farm spray liquid manure on the fields. They must have a large fleet; truck after truck after truck - and usually upwind. There were a couple times where DW & I drove out to the garden, found that the odor was too strong for us, and resolved to come back after the smell died down.

i've been chased inside quite a few times from spraying or harvesting. i just hope on the few days when the weather breaks for the better that i can get outside without that happening. it would be much better if everyone could get their spraying/harvesting done on the same days but that doesn't work out very often. i'm used to manure spreading having grown up near a dairy farm, but that was a long time ago now. you should have smelled in the year he got 100 pigs - the neighborhood got up in arms about that. someone to the NE of us has some pigs but we don't normally smell them unless there is a storm going through.

 

[Ridgerunner]

trucks from the nearby dairy mega-farm spray liquid manure on the fields.

In Northwest Arkansas it was from the commercial chicken houses, not dairies. It was spread on hay fields and pastures from what I saw. The smell only lasted a few days but it was noticeable for sure.

 

[digitS']

Right to farm ...

Something people don't think about when they dream of country life. It's worse with industrial farming. Not long ago, a dairy contaminating a watershed finally closed down. Wrong place for something that had just grown too, too large for its location. However, even back in the days when we had a farm, I remember another place where the house and barns were on the side of a hill. As far as you could see, there was not a blade of grass, only mud, manure and cow tracks.

@flowerbug, I can sympathize with your mother. An hour ago I was writing something about skin rashes. Corn can give me a rash and the idea of dust and debris blowing in from a corn harvest has me cringing. Cough, gasp!

Steve

 

[flowerbug]

Right to farm ...

Something people don't think about when they dream of country life. It's worse with industrial farming. Not long ago, a dairy contaminating a watershed finally closed down. Wrong place for something that had just grown too, too large for its location. However, even back in the days when we had a farm, I remember another place where the house and barns were on the side of a hill. As far as you could see, there was not a blade of grass, only mud, manure and cow tracks.

@flowerbug, I can sympathize with your mother. An hour ago I was writing something about skin rashes. Corn can give me a rash and the idea of dust and debris blowing in from a corn harvest has me cringing. Cough, gasp!

Steve

i've driven across the country and experienced CAFO's in Oklahoma and Texas on a hot summer day. i'd never smelled anything that bad before. there was a small farm up the road from us where he kept about a dozen cows in a pen that was about 50 x 50 feet square. they were standing up to their knees in cow poo all day every day. what a disgusting way to treat an animal. he died a few years ago and that paddock is no longer there and the cow poo was scraped to the side and left in a hill to mellow out for a while - it grows some big weeds now. by contrast today i drove by the farm field several miles to the south of us that has a half dozen or so beefaloes in about 20 acres - nice and tall grass there - sometimes when i drive by i can't even see them.