A pumpkin sub-lease

I ran out of garden.

I knew it was going to happen.  I knew there was no way I’d fit a larger quantity of vine crops in my existing spaces, especially since I beefed up production for market this year.  And all spring I’ve been trying to figure out what I was going to do when it came time to plant the pumpkins.  I finally ran out of brainstorming time, and I didn’t really have a great solution.

So I planted the pumpkins in the horses’ pasture.  A sub-lease, of sorts.  I’ll have to put up a temporary fence to keep them out of the pumpkins (right now they are in the other pasture), but I think it will work out ok for this year.  I had a good sized piece of my weed fabric left from last year, so I just rolled that out and planted them on it.  My thinking is that by the time the plants are big enough that the vines start to creep off the fabric, they will be well established enough that they can compete with the wees that will grow up around the fabric.  I’ll mow as best I can until the vines venture off.  It sure beats tilling a giant plot and then having to till or hoe all the weeds!

I knew that my tendency to hoard collect salvage landscaping rocks and brick from work would eventually pay off.  I needed a lot of rocks to pin the fabric down.

I locked the horses out of the small paddock while I was planting so that they wouldn’t walk all over the fabric.  They were not happy about it.

But the whole task took longer than I had planned, and I figured I’d better let them in to get to the water tank (it was very hot!).  They were quite suspicious of what I’d done to their paddock.

The final planting inventory is three hills of winter squash, four hills of water melons, six hills of gourds, and ten hills of pumpkins.

This poor, neglected blog

Well, it looks like spring/summer has finally decided to stay, after several weeks of indecision.  So for the past couple of weeks I’ve been up with the sun, busting my hump as best I can (and as best Caitlin will allow) to get all the planting done.  I’m just about finished.  I still have to plant the herbs, a few tomato stragglers, some pepper stragglers, squash, melons, pumpkins, gourds, beans, and parsnips.  I’ve kind of run out of garden space, so the last little bit is taking longer than usual as I try to figure out where all of it is going to go.  Especially all the vines – the pumpkins and gourds and melons.  Those are likely going to be planted somewhere out in the pasture.  I think.  Maybe.

I will get pictures of  all the little baby plants as soon as I can!

The good news is that I will finally have lettuce, radishes, and onions to take to the next market!

The farm wakes up

After such a cool, wet spring, we are finally getting  a burst of warm weather.  In fact, if I were being picky, I might say that yesterday (90 degrees) and today (85 and humid) were a little TOO warm.  But I’m trying not to complain.

That means, however, that the farm is finally waking up for summer.  The grass is a mile high (because I haven’t had time to mow yet), the trees are leafing out, the orchard is blooming, and the toads are awake.  I love all the critters at the pond who sing all summer long.  There are a couple of big bullfrogs that roar at night, and lots of other frogs and toads raise quite a ruckus.  The American Toads woke up yesterday and are making quite a racket.  One of my favorite parts of summer is laying in bed with the windows open, listening to the frogs and toads at night.

My apologies for the shakey-cam here.  It’s tough to one-hand a camera phone with a wriggling child in my other arm.  You’ll want your volume on for this!

Last minute preparations

Last week I was completely swamped with final preparations for the first market of the year.  In addition, I was trying to prep some stuff to go to a garage sale at a friends house.  It was pretty chaotic here last week.  I’m pretty behind on everything, and I’ll spend most of this week trying to finish up the stuff I should have finished up last week before market started.

Nevertheless, the first market day was successful.  If the rest of the season goes as nicely as the first day did, I will be a very happy camper.  I didn’t have much to take, but I took 6 flats of tomato seedlings, 1 flat of brussels sprout seedlings, bags of compost, some hand-stamped canvas tote bags, recycled feed bag totes, and a bit of my crafty stuff.

I bagged up the compost Thursday afternoon.  The compost pile is in a corner of the horse pasture, and of course, as soon as I got to work in there, the boys came over to help me out.

Pokey is very helpful.

Uno quickly discovered that I was using old feed bags to contain the compost.  I turned them inside out to hide the logos and give them a cleaner look.  This, of course, exposed all the crumbs, which needed to be cleaned up.

I spent half my time retrieving my bags from around the paddock.

Despite feeling very unprepared, and a little intimidated by the other “big time” veggie vendor (with several acres, employees, greenhouses, and a fancy trailer to haul them around to their multiple farm markets), the day was successful.  The people in town were very receptive to the new market, we have a prime location, and I think this will be a great season.

Tomato Threat Level

Today’s Tomato Threat Level:  LOW

The middle number is the outside temperature.

Cripes

Things that do not inspire me to work in the garden:

#1

#2

Ok, maybe those are both the same thing.  But you get my point, right?

A workstation

Two summers ago, I came up with the idea of having a garden sink/workstation outside somewhere, so that I would have a place to wash and prep veggies before I brought them in the house.  So I put my former employer on the lookout for a kitchen sink as he was doing demolition work.  For many months, I checked in with him to see he’d found me a sink – any sink, nothing fancy – but lately contractors have been stripping and salvaging pretty thoroughly from the houses that they are tearing down.  They’ve even been taking the kitchen sinks, apparently.

Finally, in a stroke of good fortune, a restaurant in Delavan, WI burned down.  (Ok, maybe this was only a stroke of good luck for me.)  My former employer won the bid for the demo clean-up.  A few days later, I got a phone call from my boss, saying he’d found me something better than a kitchen sink – he’d found me a stainless steel commercial kitchen sink.  And, as an added bonus, it wasn’t inside the building when it burned, but rather sitting out back of the building because of a broken leg.  So it wasn’t scorched.  Score!

I picked it up last spring, but it took until this winter for Chris to get around to constructing the table for me.  Chris mostly finished it up last night, and it was well worth the wait!  Please excuse the poor photos.  I was so excited to share it that I didn’t want to wait until I get it moved out of the dark shed.  I promise more photos when I get it set up outside.

It’s about eight feet long – four feet of sink and four feet of tabletop.  There are shelves underneath for storage of garden implements, and there will be a shelf under the sink once Chris gets the drain routed toward the back of the table.

I’m going to set it up next to the hydrant by the garden.  My initial plan was to just run a short piece of hose from the hydrant through one of the holes where the faucet would go, with a garden sprayer on the end.  Chris is contemplating installing a real faucet, or at least some sort of semi-fixed sprayer head that could be mounted for hands-free operation or pulled out for more precise use.  Kind of like the retractable sprayer heads on the fancy kitchen faucets.  I’m going to set the table on a gravel pad, and the drain will just run out on the ground.

The table is constructed from treated lumber, except for the tabletop, which is cedar.  I wasn’t too keen on having the treated lumber in direct contact with my veggies.  The far half of the table top is solid, and the half nearest the sink is slatted to allow water to drip through.  Chris is going to add a scrap of metal roofing beneath the tabletop, angled toward the back of the table, so that any water that drips through the top drain away and not drip on whatever is being stored on the shelves below.

Solid and slatted tabletop.

I’m hoping to prep the gravel pad for the table later today, and then maybe I’ll get the table set up out by the garden sometime this week.  We’ll have to wait until the ground dries out a bit – the table is HEAVY, and we’ll have to use the bobcat to move it.

Many thanks to my very handy and talented husband!