Time is tearing by, and there’s still lots more tomato-supporting work to be done, but it’s coming along. The good thing about my for-now semi-sprawl method is that it can be done reasonably effectively quite far along. The toms are indeed starting to really sprawl, but we still have a week or so when pulling them up is fairly easy and it will keep the paths clear and the fruit off the ground. Off course, stringing them together from both sides does make for a dense mass of tomato plant, but a bit of quick pruning and it’s better all around than without! We’ll see for sure over the next few weeks of tomato harvest…
Summer
Hauling garlic
Today, we started bringing in the garlic. A gentle loosening of the soil with a digging fork—don’t spear those bulbs!—a gentle pull, and it’s done. When to harvest is a bit of a toss-up, at least, as far as I’ve made out from my three years of garlic growing. The general indicator of leaves dying off is a start, but I’m a little wary from last year’s harvest, where the garlic left only a week or so into August, with half the leaves still green, gave up a whole lot of split bulbs (the cloves began pushing back and the skin at the top split open). So now, I dig up a few, and if they look good, it’s time to harvest! This first haul is about a quarter of around 2,400. It’s off to the barn for curing in small stacks. The rest should be done in the next few days!
Making stakes
In the building and fixing department, there’s always a queue. Jobs are usually one of three degrees of urgency: Right Away (fix it or we can’t go on!), It Would Be Really Good To Have This Done Soon, and When There’s A Little Extra Time (and that’s often, all the way to Fall). Today, it’s finishing a Right Away job: making up more wooden stakes for the tomatoes. Last year, I bought for very cheap a pile of scrap wood, 10-12′ lengths, rough cut to around 2″ square, from a local sawmill. This year, we found pounding stakes made from this stuff a foot or so into the ground took an insane amount of sledgehammer effort, especially when driving into dry soil. Cutting them down just a bit made a HUGE difference. Using a table saw out in the barn yard, we shaved about 1/2″ lengthwise off each width, winding up with maybe 80 1-1/2″ square stakes. It took a couple of hours overall to save many more in the field, not to mention energy, sweat, frustration. The little things do indeed make all the difference! (Also in the pic, painted white, an old door scrapped during the Milkhouse Extension, and a nice, solid pallet (probably from the seed potato delivery), both to be reused in the composting toilet enclosure, an IWBRGTHTDS project.)
Pumpkin update
After a marathon session of pigweed pulling, the pumpkin patch appeared, looking rather orderly and much expanded from one month ago. So, all’s well with the PUMPKINS, on to the hopefully last major de-pigweeding of winter squash. I noticed back-to-school ads in a local paper already, and as obnoxiously early as that is, we are also preparing for that final summer stretch in the field. Oh well, tomatoes, peppers and eggplant are doing great, garlic is soon to be pulled, the best eating and market days are still to come!
Eggplant on the way
Tucked away and safely shaded from scorching sun, a Dusky eggplant happily expands. The earlier tiny eggplant puzzle, while never solved (eggplant and peppers were fruiting extra early, tiny fruit on tiny plants), no longer matters, and the brief Colorado potato beetle onslaught was successfully weathered. All varieties of eggplant are doing great (that’s Dusky, Black Beautry, Vittoria, Fairy Tale and Millionaire), with abundant fruit well ahead of any other year on this tiny farm!
Sunflowers show up!
The first few sunflowers are unfolding, this one’s from the Go Bananas! mix (there are also burgundy Claret and familiar orange Sunrich). It’s a little bitten and tattered—the rough and ready look!—but a welcome sight nonetheless. The cutflower garden‘s received very little attention since seeding, and only maybe half have flourished in spite of lack of water and a fairly weeded-over state. The flower test plan included minimal care (which is what they got), so I’m not disappointed, although it’s always nice when crops take care of themselves (this doesn’t happen often enough :)! Anyhow, we should have at least a couple of hundred fair sized sunflowers, and some others, all headed for the CSA shares. I hope the zinnias do well!
Fish in the field
A different order of fieldwork: eating up the leftovers! A couple of rainbow trout left over from yesterday had to be used, so I coated them in cornmeal, pan-fried ’em in olive oil and butter, with a sprinkling of salt and pepper, squeezed some lemon over, and took ’em out to be picked at in the field. The trout was joined by leftover roasted potatoes from last night’s dinner harvest, and fresh flat leaf parsley. Fast, no fuss (my cooking skills are so far…basic!). The photo’s kinda funny. I set the plate down on a path to get the parsley, which is growing two feet away, snapped the shot, then noticed what all was in it: a little pigweed growing on the left, some mallow on the right, and grass all around, my weed friends looking on… Rain: another intense storm overnight finally gave us just over an inch (25mm), and then gave way to this beautiful, sunshiny day. Still, that’s only about 40mm in 40 days!