Posted By FarmerJ on May 30, 2010

…on Sunday.  I’m not getting any better at this, am I?  It’s quite obvious spring sprung a few weeks ago ~ all the country critters are active, and so are we.  However, not a lot of it was aimed at farming this week.  Our schedules and the weather had other plans.

Nonetheless, the farmstead plants are active, too, despite being pelted with hail and getting tattered by 35 – 45 mph winds.  The plum tree has put on little plum babies.  We’ve never actually been able to eat a plum from this tree, though.  It puts on loads of fruit, they slightly ripen, and then fall.  We’re not sure why.  This will be our third summer here, so maybe this will be the ‘charm’ year, yes?

Darling Husbie returned to the farmstead Tuesday evening after having been gone a little over two weeks.  He had to coordinate and command the aviation piece of a pre-deployment training exercise in Guernsey, Wyoming [the weather gave them everything from record-breaking snowfall and cold temperatures to funnel clouds].

While all of us, his loving family, were elated to have him home again, the weeds…not so much.  I’d been telling him the weeds in the slough and the back forty were trying to overrun us.  I tried to keep them tamed as much as possible with Kitty, the Cub Cadet, but the slough is too rough for her.  Ya’ll know how ‘seat time’ sets Darling Husbie right with the world.  Well, he got all the seat time he wanted on Thursday.  I think he spent somewhere around eight hours in the seat.  Tym the Tractor and the brush hog got a workout along the edges of the slough, alfalfa field and the back forty, and then he cleaned up the slough with good ol’ JD [the John Deere lawn tractor our neighbor gave to us because a steering link had broken and so he just went and bought a new one...a new lawn tractor, that is!].  JD is older, so we feel a little better about running him over the rough stuff rather than beating up Kitty too much.

While the weeds around the slough were trying to overrun us, the grass in the sweet corn plot did a superior job of making its annoying presence known.  It’s hard to believe that less than two weeks ago, I went up and down each row on my hands and knees pulling every weed and grass stem that dared rear its undesirable head.  It was pristine, if dirt can be pristine, that is.

So, Thursday’s task for Husbie was cultivating the corn plot.  Yep, more seat time for the man.  The process horrified and killed about a gazillion weeds, but there was still at least a half gazillion left.  Later, Tym and the tiller took care of all those you see in the ‘runway’ ~ the six foot path between each variety of sweet corn.  Unfortunately, we’re still going to have to get down on our hands and knees and pull a bunch of grass that remains in and around the corn baby stalks.  That sounds like a great job to enlist the help of two unsuspecting teenage boys!  Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!  Anyway, despite the annoying grass, the corn babies seem to be doing quite well.

The two 150-foot rows of potatoes seem to be pretty happy, as well.  The first row [the one with the soaker hose in it] is the row of ‘mystery’ potatoes.  They’re seed potatoes we made from last year’s crop.  They’re mystery potatoes because Darling Husbie and I disagree on what variety they are.  I say they are Red Pontiac, because it was the Red Pontiac potatoes I left in the bin because they didn’t keep as well as the Yukon Gold and they were too far sprouted to try to save them for eating.  Husbie says they are Yukon Gold, because he cut enough Red Pontiac seed potatoes we purchased this spring to know they are not Red Pontiac.  So, they’re a mystery until fall when harvest time arrives!  Heehee!  Perhaps we’ve created a hybrid Prairie Farmstead Spud, eh?!

The sweet pea babies are finally taking a hold, and I am relieved!  They were painstakingly slow in germinating this year, so much that I was afraid I was just going to have to start over with new seeds.  But, their timidness in making their appearance was undoubtedly because the soil had cooled off so much again during the wacky weather we’d been having.  The 80 and 90 degree days we’ve had this past week have certainly sprung them into action, and they are already ‘reaching’ for their trellis ~ which isn’t there yet, and the installation of such is on Husbie’s Honey-Do list.

The strawberry babies are coming on strong.  This is one 4 x 4 box of the June Bearing plants.  Darling Husbie picked our first two ripe berries Thursday.  Do you think I got even so much as a nibble off of one?  No!  He had them both snarfed down before I could even bat my lashes at him.  Heehee!  He said, “I’m sorry, Honey.  It just happened.”  Umm, yeah.  Heehee!  He redeemed himself the next morning, though, by picking me one little one that was almost ripe.  See why I love this man?!

That’s about it for this farmstead report, but things have kicked it into overdrive!  We did more yesterday than we did all last week, but that will be in the next report.

We hope you’ll stay tuned…♥

Categories: Farm Life, Gardening
Tags: