A Few Clear Days

My sister sent me this story and I thought it was good enough to pass on.  If you have open pollinated non-GMO sugar beet seed, you could be very popular!  http://home.ezezine.com/1636/1636-2010.08.17.15.30.archive.html


It's hard to decide what to do each day as there is so much to do! 

Yesterday I worked in the field looking for something to harvest.  A lot of the corn is knocked down from the tornado, but I did get a bushel of sweet corn that was ripe -- the Painted Mountain Indian corn and remaining sweet corn (old seed I'd gotten as a freebie some years ago and wanted to get rid of) have a few weeks to go before they are ready to pick -- some more Yellow Warted Summer Crookneck squash, enough various pickling cucmbers to make one batch of garlic kosher dill pickles, and a paltry handful of Provider green beans and Fava beans.  I still have to wade through the weeds to find the Old Dutch Half-Runner beans.  I'm hoping they escaped the deer.  Alas, for my garden!  There are loads of little New England Pie Pumpkins on the pumpkin vines that are hanging on despite the weather, but I'm not sure there is enough time left in the season for them to mature.  There are a few sweet green peppers that are very small yet, and my okra while growing has no flowers.  My hops bines are loaded with flowers, but the bines are still on the ground from the tornado.  I decided to pick the cabbage, bug chewed as it is, and salvage what I can.  I haven't been able to find anything that says you cannot make sauerkraut with red cabbage, so I think I will give red cabbage sauerkraut a try.  I wish the heads were good enough to sell, but I had to trim so much off each head to reach good leaves that they look pathetic. 

In the evenings I've been working on putting the chicken fence back up.  It was a mess to clear away downed wood and untangle, reshape the crushed chicken wire, and remove it from the broken fence posts, but this evening after supper I managed to finish stapling the wire to all the reinserted posts.  The new fence is much smaller and doesn't include any shade trees in the chicken run.  What the heck -- the chickens never stay inside the coop area as it is unless they sense a predator.  Now I have to build a new gate.  With that much done I feel as if I'm actually making some headway recovering from the storm.

The builders came yesterday and fixed the holes in the roof.  Thank goodness that's done!  

And today while we were in the field digging potatoes, the logger stopped by to let us know that he wants to start the logging on our side of the farm and work his way to my sister's side of the farm instead of the other way around because he didn't realize the extent of the damage to the woods.  You can't even walk in a lot of places let alone get equipment in.  Since we had the heavy duty road ramp built to accommodate logging trucks as part of our eminent domaine settlement when the County raised the road a few years back, Joe (our logger) will use the small meadow (right where Tom's deer plot is that he planted this spring) as a staging area because of easy acces to the ramp and start the logging at that point.  He also told us that as he was going through the woods he came across a bear feeding on two fawns.  Yuck! 

We managed to get three rows of potatoes dug and have three more to go.  Many of the potatoes are small and some plants are rotted.  A lot of plants are gone altogether, victims I suppose of the now demised garden deer.  I'm not sure what a proper yield would be, but we dug three 100' rows and got one full bushel basket per row.  Boy, am I glad I planted those potatoes in big hills because the ground is so wet. 

Here and there among the weeds I can spy some the herbs and flowers I planted.  I'm so glad they are growing!  Before the ground freezes I'd like to build a permanent raised bed box and transplant all of those herbs into it.  If I can't get it done, I'll mark the area with some sticks so it doesn't get accidentally tilled under and make the transplants next spring.  Now that the logger will start sooner than we expected, I have to hustle and transplant all my remaining plants from the forest garden into pots and get them out of harm's way.  I'll have to take down the fence (the one I just finished building) from around the forest garden, too.  Not sure I'll be able to do that though because there is a big "widow maker" tree on top of it. 

Say, I just had a great idea:  I'll over winter the forest garden plants in one of the garden boxes in the back yard.  That will be perfect.

Time to go.  Talk to you soon!