40 Days, 40 Nights, And 40 Inches of Rain

Pretty close to it anyway.  We are over 40 inches of rain for the spring, and now, first day of summer, we have sun.

So, here is just a field and woods.  On the south side of the town of Independence just west of us, and just south of the Ness Farm.

This is the road to the Ness Farm.  Water is running over it.  And fish are swimming over it.

What you cannot see here, is a huge garden (not ours) which is under a couple of feet of water.

Our gardens drain a little better.  Ground is wet, but nothing is in standing water.  Here Baby Vi has picked the top off of an onion and is eating it.  Copra onion I think.

And just for reference on how the corn is growing, here she is in the middle of one of the corn patches.

I have two variegated cornstalks in the Blue Speckled Flour corn.  I had a single variegated expression 5 years ago in the original Wamneheza.  How I am selecting it out for what parent varieties I have found in it.  Amos Hinton down at the Ponca Rez has the Red Speckled Flour.  I am growing out the Blue Speckled variety of it this year.  Wanted to do that last year, but just lucky I had any gardens at all last year.

Here is Phoebe and Violet with a straight white/green variegated stalk.  (the other has purples and reds in it).

Maybe I should mark these stalks, and if I get good cobs from them, segregate and grow those out as well.  Not often you get ornamental stalks from corn, but there is one variety I have seen for sale that is grown as an ornamental.  Would be kind of fun to have one that has a good eating cob as well.

Here is a close up of the mulit-colored variegated one.

Just as a before and after with weeding the squash hills.  <grin> this is a Baby Vi Mochata, prior to weeding.

And here is the after.  Plants are taking off with all of the rain, and now good heat.

Cowpeas are growing well.  Glad to have those weeded well again.  With vining, they should smother anything else that tries to come up over them again.

I did have 40 Large Flat Dutch cabbage plants here earlier.  Lost 8 of them to ….. something.  So I replaced them with Red Rocks.  Kids love sweet and sour pickled red cabbage, and I love cooking pork chops in it.

We spent 4 hours at the Ness farm getting all of the beans, cabbages and Squash hills weeded, then went home, had a bite to eat, rested from the sun a bit, and then Nell, Phoebe and I went to the Minnetonka garden.  I stirrup hoed the whole thing while they captured baby toads to bring home to our yard.  Did not take too long.  Just an hour.

They managed to collect about 200 baby toads and frogs in that time, which they released in our back yard here.  That should take care of any insect problems here at home for the summer.  These guys are voracious eaters.  This spring I found about 30 toads in our yard as soon as things were moving about, but the little ones are better at eating the small insects, so it is good to have a lot of them around, especially early on.

So there it is.  I am feeling a lot better.  Gardens are getting a little bit of a break from the rain and having some good 80 degree heat for growing now.  Nothing too torrential in the immediate forecast, and maybe things will dry out a bit.  We will see.  For now, I would rather have a lot of rain instead of not enough, but I do not own lake shore property with the waves off of the lake lapping at the foundation of my house.