April 15th. That is my last post here. I have started and then not finished more than just a few entries here. My issue is time, or lack of it, where I can compose on a computer.
The baby is now 4 months old, cute as all get out, and cutting teeth. Making feeding a bit painful for Patti. Growing by leaps and bounds. If all of those statistics on height and weight mean anything, the kid is getting all she needs to grow. 97th percentile on height and weight, but her height to weights is just at 50%, which means she is normal height for her weight. <grin> having tall parents means tall kids.
The gardens are growing. The Red Wing garden, if the reports from my parents are true, is being enjoyed by the deer. I have not got the wire mesh fencing up because the weekend I was going to do that, there was thunderstorms all weekend down there. I have not been down since to work. There is quite a bit planted, and apparently the local organic meat has been enjoying it. Not a lot I can do about that right now.
I was going to go down there on Saturday. I need help and my two oldest could help. It didn’t work. Within 20 minutes of the house they were driving me nuts bickering, fighting and complaining. I had to turn around and go home. The day was not unproductive. I took Claire and Phoebe (a better dynamic between those two) out to the Ness Farm and they hauled water for me as I hoed and hilled corn, planted beans and watermelons. 90+ degrees, wind and full sun took it out of me. Made it home, passed out for 90 minutes, and recovered.
I did the same thing to myself on Sunday, but had more time before I overheated as I started earlier in the day. Was at the Ness farm again, and by myself as the kids didn’t want to be out in the heat. There is not a lot more I could plant out there. It is pretty full and other than a few hills of squashes or some sunflowers at the edges, it is planted. There is absolutely a ton of beans, mostly for growing to dry for soup, planted out there. I even have a few varieties of cowpeas out there. I am not experimenting with many new things, but this is one of them. I have a fairly large planting (a few hundred feet of row) of one from Glenn Drowns (he runs Sandhill Preservation) that is a 90 days to dry one that has been in the ground a few weeks so it should have plenty of time. Along with that, I have 4 other types from a fellow grower in Minnesota who has preserved some varieties developed by the U of M back in the 1950s for commerical growing here before the Green Revolution promoted the monocropping of garbage GMO corn and soy in rotation. I am very interested in these as we love beans soups and chili, especially in the winter.
I only have 3 types of corn planted out there. Mandan White Flour, Wamneheza Flour, and 400 hills of Peaches & Cream hybrid sweet corn. The last was planted much later, so that there will not be any crossing. Went in a week ago and is 2″ tall already. Should mature late august, by which time the other two would have already dried down.
The Gnadenfeld F2 cross I got from Michelle Lacham, which was such a wonderful melon last year, I have about 50 of them up. Curious to see how stable it is now.
The watermelons should mature without any problems if this heat keeps up. Only about 30 of those in, but for our own personal use that is plenty.
I have two rows of 35 dwarf or determinate tomatoes in out there. Just going to stake them when they are taller. No cages.
Gardens here at home are all planted, but only the front yard is pretty. Backyard is, well, planted. Happy all is in and growing. Tomato plants I put in back in March are all loaded up with green tomatoes. We should have ripe ones well before the end of June. Not a record, but really early. Will be nice to have a lot of tomatoes starting early in the summer. Maybe even before the first day of summer. We will see. Siberian, Coldset, Moravsky Div and Gallina. The Rumi Banjan are flowering well, but that just started, and they went in the ground a few weeks after the other 4 types.
The “comments” section on this blog has 264 that are unread by me. I quickly scanned and most are spam of the drug or porn type. Forgive me please for not responding to questions asked in the last 2 months.
The Minnetonka garden I do with Frank Calta looks beautiful due to my sticking around the area more (neglecting Red Wing) and Frank’s loving attention to detail. I have an intensely planted bed with a rugose mid sized tomato called Sungold (4 plants) surrounded by Czech Bush which is a dwarf rugose plant. Looking to get a cross out of them and try to get a taller plant with as strong of a stalk as Czech Bush. I have friends who are experts at crossing tomatoes. Maybe I will get some chance crosses, or perhaps I will have to hit up Tom Wagner or one of the group “Just Tomatoes” on Facebook for advice.
Kids are out of school. Baby sleeps through the night. Life is a whirlwind and we are tripping and traipsing our way through it. I will try to update this more often. I will also try to take more photos. If I searched through the computer I could probably find some to post here but now I have to go do other things and I am being tugged at by children who want me to be doing things other than typing on a computer.
