Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm

The blackberries are pretty much done with – we are only picking some “stragglers”, enough for a pie here and there, but that’s about it.  Luckily they are done, because we’ve been picking and freezing corn all week long.  This weekend, we picked over 150 dozen ears.  We’ve been selling most of it at the produce stand and via facebook (go Sam!!)  Whatever is not sold by the end of the day, we freeze – so far we have over 90 quarts.  The Silver King corn should be finished by the end of the week, at which point the “Incredible” corn should be ripe.  In between all the corn, Sam and Jeff managed to make the first batch of spaghetti sauce:

We are trying something different this season – mostly due to the fact that we got a whole load of “mulch” hay, courtesy of Caleb, who donated it for our vegetable garden.   Mulch hay is hay that got wet and started rotting, so it is no longer good for animal food or even bedding.  Hay, unlike straw, contains a lot of grass and weed seeds, but we are using it anyhow.  We’ll see if it does more good than bad later this fall.

Today, after weeding the tomatoes and peppers, we spread over a dozen bales of old hay around the plants, ensuring that the irrigation lines are still close to the stem of the plant before covering them up.   Much of the hay was rather matted together, so it made  a pretty solid cover.  We carefully spread the loose hay around the plants, making sure that all the leaves were above the hay.

The amount of hay we used barely made a dent in our large pile, but then again, we only covered 2 rows of vegetables in the garden so far.

Rachel and Fiona came out to help plant potatoes

Finally this weekend the weather was nice enough – and we had time – for Jeff to plow part of our garden.  We planted 4 rows of potatoes, some lettuce and spinach on Saturday.  Easter Sunday was rather cold and rainy, so we did not do anything outside, other than a quick run.  But the rain was good for the newly planted grapes as well as the garden.

Today, Jeff and Sam planted 20 lbs of peas – using the broadcast spreader on the tractor.  Jeff followed up with the disc, to help cover up the peas.   These peas take up about  “3 tractor widths”, according to Jeff’s measurements, and we now have nearly two thirds of our garden planted.

We are so caught up in the remodel project, that is seems we are not thinking about our garden, brambles and vines – but that is not quite true.  Tina actually started 3 kinds of peppers a while back, and created a page on this blog to attempt and track the vegetable garden for a year.  We also purchased several packets of seeds already and Jeff has been checking out the various heirloom websites trying to decide which seeds might be fun to “play” with this year.

We have also been trimming the blackberry bushes, whenever it is not too cold or windy and we are making some progress with it.  We are still holding off on trimming grapes until it is just a bit warmer.  We don’t have that many to do this year, so we are taking out time with them.