May 29, 2020 The Heat is Coming

Weeks tick by quickly when you stay busy. And we have been very busy.

The Farm is exploding with growth. This week the early Summer heat came, following a few nice days of late Spring rain, and the seeds Ann put in last week fairly jumped out of the dirt. The Strawberry Patch started producing just as we thought it should. We harvested twenty quarts of early Strawberries, leaving only a few behind, then either sold or gave away quite a lot of it. The berries are wonderfully red through and sweet. The early strawberries we have in the Patch are nearly finished, but since these are ever bearing varieties we expect they will continue to produce through October. The remaining berry plants are filled with fruit, but won't be ready until mid-June. There will be a great many more Berries once these other varieties begin to ripen and these later berries are also ever-bearing varieties, so we ought to be getting fruit for the remainder of the growing season.

The Strawberry Tower experiment seems to have failed, so it will be removed and we will try another idea for a you-pick berry patch next year.

Our chicken and duck egg production has fallen off in the past few weeks, and some of the chickens have taken up eating eggs, so we haven't sold many lately. We figured out that when we turned off the heat lamp in the coop it might have thrown things out of kilter a bit, so we turned the light back on and this has helped. We also are beginning to believe that our flock is probably getting a bit old, this tend to lower egg production. So we ordered twenty new chicks that will come in a few weeks.

We  added two new ducks for our flock. These new guys are Khaki Campbell ducks, a favorite of English farms.  A family up in Washington had chicks that needed a new home and advertised this on Craigslist, so they came to us for free. The new ducks are named Roscoe and Boscoe and they will join the flock in a week or so, opening up the broody hutch for the new chickens.

All of our other crops are doing well, except the corn we planted a month or so back. Ann planted another nine rows of corn in MacGreggors Market Garden to begin making up for the short-fall, and we will be re-tilling and re-planting the two-thousand seeds that failed in the Kitchen Garden. Ann also planted ninety bush beans and a myriad of other vegetable and flower seeds directly in the soil. We didn't spend time sprouting seeds in a greenhouse this year. The past two years proved that early planting really isn't worth the trouble. We may revisit the greenhouse thing later on, but for now the time is going into house building.

The new Farmhouse is going up nicely, but taking a bit more time than we had hoped. Our son Jack has been a big help, allowing Ann to spend time in the Gardens. He and I worked all week on putting the sheathing onto the wall framing we finished last week. The house is now beginning to look like a big brown box, with windows. We expected to finish the sheathing project this week but it simply is too much work. So the plan is to finish it next week and use the remainder of the week to stage the parts for putting a roof on the place.

The Farm changes every day now. Big things are happening, big things are getting done. Late Spring is is nearly over, Summer is on the way. So we hope to have the Produce Stand up and working in a few weeks, once there is enough produce to put out. Until then we will be building, weeding, and looking forward to moving into our new home.