June 30, 2010

June 13 after planting the tomatoes but before covering with mulch.

The seeder Cris used to plant this weekend.

One of the tomato plants after 2 weeks in the ground


New gutters for the barn and rain barrels.

Using screen door mesh to keep bugs out of water.

Now that the barn is 99.9 percent complete (little odds and ends will be finished when it's not 90-100 degrees outside), we have been turning our attention to the vegetable garden. We planted over 70 tomato plants, some squash, cucs, zucchini and okra. I do not recommend using the 'newspaper pots' that we blogged about earlier..... the plants did not do well in them...too wet I think. As you can see by the photos, we did used newspapers as weed block, followed by a cover of mulch and compost which seems to work pretty good. We decided to do the planting on one of the hottest weekends we have had so far. It was rough but I had a mini umbrella with stand that I carried around with me. We planted on June 13th and despite the lack of rain the last couple of weeks, the tomotos are doing great. Some of our other plants did not do so well but we planted more seeds to replace them. This past Sunday we planted beans, peppers, sweet corn and more squash and cucs. Cris bought a seed planter that you walk behind and the seeds drop out and then the planter has a part on it that covers the seed. It worked pretty good.

We did get a great rainstorm this past Saturday so hopefully that will help the vegies sprout.

We have a lot of wild blackberries growing and the organic blackberry plant we have at home in Memphis is blooming with berries.....unfortunately, the dogs eat them as soon as they get ripe.

As I stated before, at times, it seems like we are working on the equipment more than actually working on the farm. The tractor gave us a fit this past weekend but it's nothing that Cris can't fix....it's just finding the time to do it. He seems to think the gas tank is dirty and it's clogging up the carburetor. It's an old Ford tractor without a filter....but he plans to put a filter in between the gas tank and carburetor to clean up the gunk. I'm glad he knows what he is doing.

This past weekend we also put up 100 feet of gutter and installed rain barrels on the barn. The goal is to catch the rain (if it ever rains) and then use it to water the plants.

This weekend we are harvesting honey. The bees have been so busy so we are hoping for some really sweet honey.

The wheat has been harvested off our property and the natural grasses from the area are growing in nicely. This means we don't have to do much planting in the way of a cover crop...which is a good thing.