Planting

Forever Friday 32/45

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well it’s closing in on my home time, in two weeks I will be at work trying to figure out what has changed in the 6.5 weeks I have been gone. I am actually looking forward to going back and getting back in the thick of things. This is starting to affect my at home timeline. I had a friend bring over more plants on Sunday that they had culled out of their garden. I planted five more currants, four more bush raspberries and two more thornless blackberries and trimmed off about 8 blackberry pieces and shoved them into some dirt and tossed some water on them, hopefully they will grow. I have enough blackberries now. I still need about four more raspberry canes to fill in the rest of the line. I need to hammer in some pecker poles and create a couple of wire supports for the plants to grow on. I also went through the area and hoed up all of the thistles. The garden area looks much better. I am hoping that next year I can hit it early and kill all the weeds. I used Black Gold potting soil around all the plants this time to give them a jumpstart. I am going to do that with all the transplants from now on. Our soil is solid clay in places and just does not provide that initial surge growth that is needed for the plants to get well established.

I drove in early today to town and picked up more potting soil and ran errands. I was able to get everything I needed and fit it into my car. I did not want to take the rock filled trailer off of the pickup so I got it all to fit by using my trunk, backseat and front floorboard for storage.

Today, Mr Professional and his progeny came out for two hours and helped me plant the rest of the plants over in the flooded zone. The only plants that survived the flood was a male sea berry that was underwater, five echinacea plants and today I found some little bitty green plant that I remember planting but don’t remember what it is called. Nothing else survived the flood. We planted15 more plants and spread out some flower seed. Every plant got potting soil around it, it took all 8 bags I purchased plus two more from the leftovers in the lavender garden, there are only two bags left unused now. As we were planting the tiny little plants the teenager chickens kept coming into the flower area. I had not anticipated this as they are just squeezing through the large square openings in the ranch panels. The chickens will eat all of my new flowers and bushes! So then we had to string up 18 inches of chicken wire in the inside of the new fence to keep the chickens out. If I had thought of this earlier while building the fence I could of accounted for this but it did not occur at that time that the chickens would be a problem. I left two plants down in the spring water to see if they would snap back, they did not look good after staying out all night. I even watered everything last night before coming inside. Back at the fence tomorrow…

More gardens

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I have been getting help on the farm from Mr Experience.  We are trying to get the fields ready and planted for spring barley and its getting late.  I am not sure if we are going to make it but we only have about one week left or it will never fly.  I spent Thursday working on the bathroom a little and playing catch up.

We made a trade last fall some electric netting fence for some fruit, flower and herb starts.  Well the fence was handed out in the fall and I kinda knew the starts were coming but had managed to delay them a couple of weeks.  They showed up Friday morning.  I had already started on the area, got different help to rough in the fence and posts and I had raked the entire area by hand to make it very pretty!  Now I had a bunch of plants that needed to go in the ground.  This is a blessing and a curse, as I only have a couple of days to get them all in the ground.  One cannot simply just start digging holes as there are a bunch of berry plants and other various edibles.  So I made measurements and Annmarie and I kinda laid it out.  I painted marks on the ground and started digging.  I spent all day Friday and managed to get the cane raspberries, blackberries, bush raspberries, clove currants, and Nanking cherries planted and watered in the orchard garden.  We planned for 40 feet of blackberries and raspberries but only planted 10 feet of blackberries and 15 feet of raspberries.  We plotted out the Lavender area in the orchard garden and have 80 of those plants to pickup soon.  I ordered plant cover cloth, drip system parts and 28 cubic feet of colored rubber recycled tire chips and those should be here the first week of May.  Once I have all the supplies here we will lay it all out and start cutting holes for the plants.  The garden fence priority is moving up the work list quickly.  I just kicked all the animals out of th orchard so no one would eat our new plants.

I had just enough time in the rain to go over to the rock garden and kill all the thistles and stinging nettle before dark.  I was tired and needed a shower, I have gotten so used to the stinging nettle it does not bother me much anymore.  We still had 4 acres to disk in the upper field but it had rained and I was afraid that the little tractor would not be handle the moisture. So I called and borrowed a tractor from a friend.
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The plants perked right up with some soil and a lot of water!  Always nice to see them come back after getting stressed in the move.

This plan went together pretty smoothly on paper.  Annmarie is going to plot them out on the computer so we can remember all the different plant names.  There is no way I am going to remember them without some type of reminder.

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Saturday morning she tried to draft out the plan on a computer and my measurements were not quite up to the mark.  I did some ball parking on the numbers and that made the electronic version a lot harder to put together.  I vowed to do better with the rock garden and brought a couple of pieces of paper out with me to jam into my pocket and ensure I measured everything.  Did I mention that it started to rain?  The soil on one half is mostly clay and I had to hand water everything from the spring?  It was not very pleasant getting everything into the ground.  This time I planted six Seaberry trees with two more male trees, three more clove currant bushes, two autumn olives, two Josta berry bushes, a honeysuckle plant two Artemis, two Agastache purple haze, four sunflower (perennial), five echinacea, a five foot section of Iris tubers and a few odds and ends that I did not write down but did plant in amongst the rocks and down by the water.   I took lots of measurements this time!!  It still did not quite work out on the computer as expected. But it’s close enough!!

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Once Annmarie gets the plans all spiffy and neat on the computer I will post that.  I have some wild flower seed I need to spread out amongst the rocks also but I need to get the sprinkler working first before I plant them.

Feverish farming

Steve HardinLeave a comment

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It’s spring time and we are still trying to clean up from last year.  This is the field I tried to burn last fall and just could not get the fire to drive through the weeds.  It got mowed down and I wanted to plant right through the weeds but there is too much biomass on the ground.  So we ended up pushing up piles of weeds by skimming the ground with the tractor bucket.  Once those piles were made they were so dry you could light them with a lighter and nothing else.  Two days of burning has cleared off a lot of weeds. The wind has been kind enough to blow and making the fire spread as needed.

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I bought spring barley on Friday and want to get it in the ground this week.  It is supposed to rain on Wednesday and I would like to have the seed in the ground by then.  I have a small 1/2 acre plot that we saved for peas.  We sprayed every field but that one so that the 2-4-D won’t affect the peas.

I have another set of helpers out and set them to hardening the spring bank.  I only finished one side last fall.  Now both sides are blocked in and it should stop the dirt bank from falling into the spring.  We also lined the bottom of the spring with gravel in that area.  The sheep would know this if they would quit trying to jump over the water.  This did require the teenage helper to redo the wall three times to get it where it needed to be.

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I have been working on my sheep calling abilities.  I have managed to post a couple of successful videos to Instagram.  The key to success is in choosing the right time to call them.  They are used to coming in at night for food and to be locked up in the barn area.  I have had zero luck trying to call them down off the hillside midday.  But if they can hear me in the evening they will come running.

We sold three more lambs off this weekend to someone who is going to raise them all summer long.  We sent our old brown ewe and her 3 month baby over with the lambs so they could try and hand tame the lambs.  Our old ewe will come to anyone who she thinks has food.  We also do not want her getting bred when we release the ram into the main herd.  90E31C90-FECF-4C46-B18B-0822D40F0E68I spent last night on the tractor for 4 hours driving around in circles pulling a disc trying to get the flooded out field from last year ready for spring barley crop.  The ground was full of ruts from the back creek flooding the field and making rivulets.  I hope I got most of them smoothed out.  We are hoping to get the seed in the ground tonight as it is supposed to rain 0.1-0.25” tomorrow and the hope is the seed will all be in the ground by then.  One must have goals in life.