The Ness farm is as well maintained as it is going to get for now. I have other obligations for the next two weekends, and I really wanted to get into it and make sure that what is there will thrive as well as it can while being ignored for a while. The sunflowers that were planted early in the year by Lance and Heidi Ness are flowering, and the field planting of sunflowers is not too far behind. The Wamneheza corn is tasseling, and I worked on weed elimination and hauling water.
The field planting of tomatoes is doing just fine. NO where near the size that even these types are reaching in the carefully maintained gardens elsewhere, but the plants seem to have come through the scorching heat and lack of rain just fine. I gave them drinks of water throughout the morning while I was there, and pulled out all of the weeds I could find. Between the two rows of tomatoes I had planted beans. The first part of the row is Arikara Yellow, and the second longer part was Great Northern White. The Great Northern White were old seeds and they had crappy germination, so I reseeded it yesterday with Daikon radish and watered that in well today.
There is another row of beans in the photo off to the left, right before the corn, which is flowering well, and on the far right side of the photo is a row of cabbages I set out a couple of weeks ago. The sweet corn I had hoped to weed, but by the time I was going to do it the temps were into the 90s and I really did not have the stamina to spend more time in the sun. I grabbed the weed whipper which Lance had equipped with plastic blades and just went between the rows of corn, which gets all of the weeds except the ones growing directly in the rows. Doesn’t generally kill the weeds, but gets the corn above them.
These are the squash plants which did manage to germinate from my trials of Amish Pie (left side), Japanese Pie Pumpkin and Gooseneck Gourds. Not a lot of plants here, and pretty much all of them have been hit by vine boreres. I weeded it all, hilled a lot of dirt on top of the bases of the plants, and along the stems where the touch the ground, and gave them a lot of water, hoping that they can put down some new roots and make it to maturity. On either side, just under the leaves of the corn, are a lot of my short season C. Mochata bushing squashes. Maybe they will fill it in. We will see. The weeds were thriving just fine, but hopefully this sets them back a few weeks.
I took the weed whipper to the far side of the field, next to where Nell and I had worked the other weekend weeding through the long rows of cowpeas and soup beans. They look good, and getting the weeds down on the west side, which were over 4 feet tall, gives them more sun too. All of these are flowering nicely, and some of the beans have already set their pods.
This is one of the hills of the Gnadenfeld cross OP melon showing how today, the hills are about 10 to 12 feet across. You can see the flowers, but I did not dig into the plants to see if they are setting melons yet. I cannot really walk in there without risk of stepping on the vines so I just left them alone. The watermelons, which are off to the left side of this photo, I took the weed whipper around. They are just starting to vine, with a few having 24 inch plants.
There is some trepidation on my part, wondering what it is going to look like when I get back to this garden in August, but for now, this is as good as it gets. There is a possibility of rain on Tuesday, which would be good, especially for the tasseling corn. Cannot water all of the corn by hand, and my arms are aching as it is, from hauling buckets and watering cans to all of the rows of beans, tomatoes, cabbages, and squashes. My body held out for 6 hours in this heat and humidity. I cannot ask much more of it in this weather. When I got home it was 94 degrees and humid. It took a lot out of me.
