Wednesday Mr Golfpro came out to help me with the garden. It needs to be winterized. I had planted some black raspberries from a friend at work and they did really well but they were all over the ground. I had never bothered to put a wire for them to grow upright. So we installed two new rows of raspberries. One is the new large great thorned berries and the other are transplanted cuttings from our thornless berries. The screwy part was we still had berries on the bushes! I could not believe it when we got inside the plants and found raspberries. I at the ones we found, they were good! We used the small wooden pecker poles and were able to just drive them in the ground with a post hole driver and not dig a hole. This does require quite a bit of effort but between the two of us we got it done. I did end up with a large blister on each hand that tore open before we were done. I know have bandaids on both hands to cover up the open blisters.
There were about 12’ of Sunchokes that we pulled up and tossed over the fence. The ground is pretty dry so we did not dig any up yet. It is supposed to rain on Thursday and Friday so I will dig them up after that. We disturbed enough of them from pulling up the stalks to fill four large paper bags. I expect to dig up at least six more boxes and this is from a pretty small area. These things are amazing at just growing! We were not able to get all of the garden finished but we did get the netting off of the berries and that is a huge issue so it should be a lot easier now to finish up the trimming and getting every thing tied to the wire. On the raspberries we cut out all of the canes that got trimmed and tied last year and then tie up all of the new growth and cut it to height so it will bear fruit next year. The two new rows we cut at six feet high. I was taught to cut them off at four feet. We will see if there is a difference next year.
Before we could get started on the garden we needed to play Jengo in the machine shed. I needed to park the hay laden trailer under cover so it did not get rained on and the machine shed has a cultivator torn apart in one bay, one bay is tools and welding, one has grain and wood and the other two have equipment and spray. So we put all of the hay equipment in the machine shed near the back. I was able to get the new mini excavator into the first bay so I can work on it. The second bay now has the hay trailer and we moved the cultivator over to the bay with wood and grain so I can finish repairing it. There is also space for both tractors now so they can spend the winter under cover. We had to move the old pickup and I need to see about getting it to the junkyard. We filled up the trash can and moved everything to the appropriate bay. I really need to spend about4-6 hours putting all of the tools away in their appropriate spots so there is some open counter space. I will get to that eventually! It was a good day. We even got all of the tools from the greenhouse assembly put away.
I ordered a new chicken door for the chicken coop. I found another dead chicken and am only getting two eggs per day again. I only counted 10 chickens but it was daytime and they tend to spread out. The door should be here on Friday and it has to be installed so that we at least get enough eggs to feed us through the winter. At the rate the predators are killing them I will not have any chickens.
