On Sunday, this is what the Ness Farm looked like when we showed up. Made me cringe. Patti had been here a few times since I last had, weeding in the onions. I had not mowed here in two weeks. It showed, in a most serious fashion.
To be fair, Patti is on her knees here, but she is fairly buried in the weeds. I have not mowed here for various reasons in the last two weeks. One is that I was working at getting more planting done at the Adickes Farm. Second was the days I purposely set aside to do the row mowing, it rained, though the weather gods had claimed that on those days, the chances of rain were slight. Oh well. you roll a 20 sided di often enough, it will come up 20 5% Of the time. And it did. Twice. One the days I had planned on mowing previous to this.
Now, granted, the second of those days was just this last Saturday morning, so from then until yesterday was not that big of a deal, and I could have been here Saturday afternoon but I was giving a talk at the Saint Paul Minnesota chapter of the Weston A Price Foundation on how to grow your own food, so it is not as though I was not using my time in a goood way, I just was not out in the gardens.
But I did get all of the rows mowed on Sunday. It took a long time. Not as simple as just pushing the mower between all the rows. What you can see here represents 7 hours of work in 80%+ humidity and 85 degrees, which was really physically rough on me. I am not built for hot weather.
I would not do well in the tropics. I have been there. I know this to be true.
Monday, after being at the office all day, we headed back out. I first planted in between the experimental pole beans which, with old seed, had crappy germination and I don’t want the trellises Claire and I put up to be used in such an inefficient manner, so I put in stabilized beans that are still crosses I have worked on to fill in the gaps. Patti was working on corns, and when I was done with the beans I joined her.
Patti and I got through our black seeded flour corn experiment pretty well, and then the Iroquois White Flour in a less clean fashion. That one needs to be gone back over, and the Painted Mounted needs to be gone though cleanly. It was weeded by me a few weeks ago, but the weeds are catching up.
The photos above are Violet watering in what we weeded through, which is important to do. Weeding, especially when the weeds are this prevalent, means you need to set the roots of the plants you WANT there back into the soil which has been loosened by the removal of the other plants. The kids hauled water for us, and things are looking good. Assuming the weather gods are correct we will be back there tomorrow to finish up the first big weeding of the summer and I will feel better about things.
