A Beautiful Weekend To Be Outside

We got a lot of time in outside this weekend.  In fact, we spent pretty much all of it out in the sun somewhere.  Nell and I started early in the morning out at the Ness farm working on weed removal.  It had just been too blazing hot out there the last few weeks to do too much grunt work like this, but on a morning looking like this, it was really pleasant to just have the time together.  No one else was even awake when we left our house.

Watermelon plants are looking good.  Not going hog wild yet, but I would expect that by the end of the month they will blanket the ground where I have them.

Morning sun is bright <grin> as evidenced by Nell trying to smile and shade her eyes at the same time.  This is a hill of seeds from the melon from Michel Lacham (see http://threedaughtersfarm.com/wp/?p=1154) we loved so much yet have no idea how variable the fruits and plants will be this year.  Though the hill shown is fairly compact yet, there are some which have vined out 48 inches already.

The tomatoes I planted out there are doing fine.  Not growing huge, but then again, none of the types I put out there are supposed to get huge.  They will need to be staked at some point, but I think I am just going to take a pruner down into the marsh there and cut some tag alder lengths to stake them with.

The photos above show Nell in the corn (for scale) and the first is Mandan White Flour, second is Wamneheza Flour, and the third is Victor Kucyk 2175.  Lance ran his cultivator between the rows with his tractor which was nice.  None of it is tasseling yet, but the Victor Kucyk corn is catching up to the old flour corns in height.  That is expected, as the Mandan will likely only get about 6 feet tall with tassels, the Wamneheza will get to about 7, and the Victor Kucyk might get to about 9 feet.

Lance also cultivated in the sunflowers.  The field planting of Arikara Sunflowers really took off in the last week.  Some of them are over Nell’s head already.

Nell and I could not stay real late at the Ness farm, which was part of the impetus for getting out there early on Saturday.  Claire had spent the night with Aunt Cindy, but due to other circumstances and a family emergency Cindy had to attend to, Claire needed to be picked up by 9 am, which gave me a good excuse to go to the Minnetonka garden with both Nell and Claire to check it out.  Frank is on another fishing trip and I wanted to just make sure everything there is coming along well with nothing needing immediate attending.

The popcorn is well over all of our heads, is setting ears, and looks beautiful!  Ear set is all 3 to 5 feet off the ground which keeps it well out of the general reach of critters, and the stalk strength on this is impressive.  We had some good storms this year, but none of the corns I grew either here or at the Ness farm were laid down by it.  Selecting seeds only from plants that do not fall down in wind storms has been working out well for me.

The Cherokee Purple tomatoes are by far the largest we have set on plants here.  No sign of them ripening yet, but the first fruits look wonderful.

Frank must be feeling optimistic about some of the pepper plants.  He had put tomato cages around a few of them.  We have never had issues with them falling over, and there was no evidence that this one had, but I suppose, it can’t hurt to cage it, and you would hate to not cage it and then have it break off at the base after having such a nice set of flowers.

This is the C. Maxima squash called simply “German” I received from Glenn Drowns at Sand Hill Preservation.  It is not growing as quickly where it is planted underneath the corn compared to those in full sun, but it is doing fine.

This is one of the C. Mochata from my March planting, growing and flowering happily.

This is one of the two spots I planted Mandan Black beans.  They had started to sprawl a bit so to encourage them to twine up the fence I used some bamboo stakes to lift and hold them up to the fence.

Kellogg’s Breakfast is starting to set fruits.  Plants look healthy and are starting to grow quickly with the heat.  No evidence of issues of heat stress with them (or any other tomato plants for that matter) at this garden.

I had been worried, with the heat, that the Riesentraube tomatoes would drop the blossoms this last week, but apparently I had no reason to worry.  The plants are getting loaded with fruits and flowering happily.

From here, we went home and got ready to spend the rest of the day down at my sister’s in Faribault Minnesota, meeting my new niece and playing at the municipal waterpark there which was a good time, leaving us all exhausted.

Sunday Nell and I spent the entire morning and early afternoon out at the Ness farm again, this time concentrating on the 500+ feet of rows of soup beans and cowpeas planted early in the year.  There are a few rows planted much later as well, but the some of them were starting to sprawl, and the weeds in the rows were getting taller than the bean plants, so I took the time, on hands and knees, to crawl between the rows and pull out all of the grass and thistles (ouch) that were growing with the beans.  Nell hauled, by hand, innumerable watering cans full of water to mud the beans back in as their roots were often loosened quite a bit from the weeding.

This first photo shows on the left, a row of cowpeas, and on the right a row of Mandan Red beans.  In between is the Lutz Green Leaf beets which had poor germination, but the Detroit Dark Red beets I filled in with are coming up and there is plenty of time for those to get to maturity before fall.

This photo shows a weeded row of beans on the left, and two unweeded rows to the right.  We got through it all, but I wanted to show a before and after to emphasize why it took us 6 hours to weed and water all of it.  There just was a lot of weeds there.

And finally, just one more shot of the Gnadenfeld OP cross from Michel Lacham. <smile>