So on Friday I got the word that Rachel and Keith would be in St Louis Park, and would have our Explorer with them for us to pick up. They would give a call when the graduation party they were at was winding down. When I got home Nell, Claire and I cleaned the kitchen, cut a huge bowl of herbs and greens, bemoaned that the cats had eaten an entire row of Romaine lettuce, and then we did a Thai dish of fried fish with herbs and greens.
I found I had forgotten garlic chives when I was serving so I went back out to get some. So where does a cat go when he is full of lettuce?
Well, at least they seemed to be done eating lettuce.
At 730 we got the call to head to St Louis Park to get the car. It was an outdoor graduation party at a pool, with pie. Rhubarb, blueberry and raspberry pie. Oh my. We all had a few slices (turned out I knew the graduating person, she was a flower girl in a wedding I had been a part of 14 years ago) and at 9 Nell and I headed down to Red Wing and Patti headed home with the other two girls. We got down there at 1030 and went right to bed.
The next morning Nell and I were both up at 6. She hung out inside eating breakfast and reading while I assessed the garden. The far eastern fence is going to need to be repaired. Deer have gone through a part of it, but fixing is not going to be a big deal. Will just have to remember to bring some ties next time I go down there.
At 745 Nell and I headed to the implement rental place to pick up the tiller. The area of the field I had tilled earlier this spring but not planted had grown over, and some of the weeds were starting to flower. We started in sections, first doing the long rows for two trellises, marking them with posts and string, and then planting double rows, 80 feet long, of Christmas Lima and Hidatsa Sheild beans.
Next was the northern section of the field which I planted half in Iroquois White Flour corn, and the other half in Dakota Rainbow Flint, which Nell had chosen as the other main planting of corn here. Between the two, and all the way to the southern end of the field (well past the corn planting) we did a long double row of Mandan Red beans.
Then all the way across the top of the field we planted beds of beans, all dry soup beans.
Arikara Yellow
Jacob’s Cattle Gold
Hutterite Soup
Hidatsa White
Mandan Valentine
I also planted a couple hundred seeds of Shirofume edible soybeans. I grew these a couple of years ago, just 20 plants, and got about 2 pounds of seeds from them. With so much from a few plants I am hoping that I get enough to do a large scale planting next year. We can eat them fresh if we want to, but I would rather have a good source of organic soybeans to supplement the chicken feed we are growing (corn and sunflowers so far) instead of having to buy the stuff.
By the time it was getting too dark to see, we had beds of every kind of bean in and the field parts that had to be re-tilled were done, but there was still a section about 40X80 that needed to be planted, as well as an area near the west end of the field where I had planted 41 Czech Bush tomatatoes and I wanted to fit in a bunch of New Big Dwarf tomato plants at the end, and a planting of Arikara Watermelons. Nell and I got up early again today, finished the bean plantings, and got in the watermelon seeds as well. Nell did a little weeding of sunchokes that were growing around the tomato bed, and we were done.
We packed everything up, I returned the tiller, and then it was up to the Waterpark and the Mall of America for the afternoon with David & Rebecca for her birthday party. Patti met us there as well with the rest of our kids, and we spent the afternoon, well into the evening alternately running stairs to do the huge slides, and lounging in the kiddie pools or sitting on inner tubes on the gentle “river” that circles the entire facility. We got home fairly late in the evening, got some more food into the kids (they had cake and pizza at the waterpark) and putzed around in the garden here. Taking a lot of magnesium tonight. A bit worried about my legs cramping up after doing more than a hundred flights of stairs, especially after how much other carrying my legs did this weekend.
I didn’t make it to the Ness farm this weekend. Going to have to find time, sometime this week, to get out there. Frank called me to tell me that he had got out to the Minnetonka garden, watered and weeded, and that it all looked good.
