June 14, 2019 The Heat Came and Left

The top row of plants, once we lowered the trough,
had a great many berries.
Each type had it's own flavor.

Summer came to the Farm this week, if only for a few days. We hit a few solid ninety degree days with a nice light breeze and things started showing signs of significant growth in the Market Garden. A good thing too because we were starting to worry. Looking back to last year it seems we didn't have much produce until mid July. I had always assumed that this was due to our late planting and inexperience. Now I'm thinking that it might be the way of things. Anyway, the crops are growing and lettuces are on the way.

The heat got the Strawberries growing rapidly, but it is still a bit early to expect much fruit. On Thursday we made some adjustments to our Strawberry Tower experiment, lowering the trough planters and changing the spacing. The previous configuration was a bit too tall to keep the topmost trough planter clean and too tall to see into easily for picking. However, the Tower is beginning to perform as expected. A month back I put a mist watering system into the Tower and the water got things moving pretty well. We still need to mulch the Tower with the same horse compost stuff we used on the Strawberry patch last week. We expect things will go much better in the Tower afterward and it looks good for expanding the Tower garden either later this year or very early in the next.

After lowering the troughs we have a bit of stooping,
but no reaching, when we clean and pick.

There are four varieties of  berries in the Patch. All are ever-bearing types, meaning that they will produce until the cold weather returns. Each of these has it's own fruit style and a distinct flavor profile. We chose these four types for an experimental trial but lost track of which  plant was of which type a long time ago. But it is pretty easy to tell which is which by the characteristics of the fruit that each plant gives. Some are brightly flavored,  some mild, and one has a sort of smokey mild flavor. Some are better for cold serving, some for canning. We had intended on choosing one type of the four and then scaling up the project using just the one. But the jury is still out as to which one to eventually prevail. It doesn't really matter right now, the berries we get right now are a bit small, the harvest is still very small, but the flavors are wonderful. We freeze those that don't sell out at the Produce Stand

We did quite a bit of cultivating in the Flower Garden, pulling the many hundreds of  bulbs out where we had put in only dozens last year. The Dahlias came into bloom and the Hostas are all doing well. Marigolds began flowering too, along with the first of the Nasturtiums. These will help deter the Japanese Beetles that eat little holes in the vegetable crops. We planted hundreds of large Marigold seeds outside of the back fence using seeds harvested last year. These are great habitat for bumble bees and help pollination. We also went into the woods this week to collect native Shamrocks and Ferns for the botanic gardens we have yet to plan. These new plants will be potted and propagated until they are needed for planting.

Our dirt cleaning project seemed to enter it's final stage this week as we began raking under the dirt in the last areas of obvious trash and debris found near the new home site. It's seems amazing to us that we are going to have to search for trash following this raking, but I am sure we'll find some if we look. There is still plenty to do. Right now the Farm is mostly weed free and soon will be trash free. The Farm looks pretty good nearly everywhere you look and once the trash is finished we will be able to begin laying out the botanical gardens and paths system to surround the food and flower production gardens, and the animal habitats.

The new ducklings moved out into their own little field this week, leaving behind the locked doors of our broody coop. The new duck habitat is adjacent to the old duck pond we set up in the Winter. The new field has a miniature coop for them to sleep in and get food, and we bought them their own kiddy pool to splash in.They seem to like it out there, but are really skittish and afraid of their own shadows. The ducklings are already getting big and ought to fledge out their adult feathers soon. Once they have their adult characteristics we will mix the two flocks into one. We decided to re-home one of the drakes because having two drakes is hard on adult hens, much more so on baby hens, but so far nobody has jumped at the opportunity to own a pet duck.

Jim the Duck is up for re-homing.

Egg production is a bit low this time of the year with only about one dozen coming out of the nearly fifty chickens and ducks. We found that a large Raven had been taking duck eggs in the early hours. A Duck egg is quite large but the raven still seemed to need two of the three we get every day so we are going out in the first light to collect the Duck eggs, chicken eggs are collected from the coop in the late evening. Otherwise, egg production is cyclical and we are just finding out what the cycle looks like. We'll have more eggs soon.

No good news on the house permit front. We got a letter requiring us to have a grading permit application, so I'll do this next week. The County seems to be adding things now just to see what they can get away with. The grading permit is completely un-necessary since we will do no grading at all and the County guidelines seem to say that we won't need it. But the show must go on so I'll fill out the grading permit form. I vowed that I would not cut my hair until the house is built. My hair is now well over my shoulders.

Our annual Summer Supper planning has begun. We did one last year and hoped to host a dinner at the Farm every year for neighbors and friends. This year we are planning the same date, but because of all the big changes made this year the event will be moved to a prettier location. Right now we're thing of putting where the Kitchen Garden will eventually be laid out. More to follow as we find more to say . . .