I decided to tie up the dwarf tomatoes down in Red Wing. I am losing a lot of tomato plants to blight this year, and since these have had a good set of fruits this should help to minimize losses at this location. Nice thing about the plants being fairly short is I was able to simply tie a heavy woven clothesline between deeply set iron re-bar stakes down the length of the garden, and then used pieces of soft wire to fix the plants to it. Took a little bit, but had it done by nightfall. Some of the tomatoes are starting to blush and by next week I should be picking a good number out of there.
Saturday I spent clearing out around all of the existing grape vines, and planting 6 more. Not the ideal time of year to plant them probably, but those are the ones that grew from the cuttings I took from the vines last winter. Also had a Concord from the cuttings I took off of a huge vine up on the Bayfield Peninsula last winter. I put that one near the entrance of the garden.
There was a small amount of harvesting that I did. Nothing too grand. The Mandan White Flint corn that made it through the cold wet spring, and survived the subsequent smothering of weeds is drying down and I salvaged a few dozen ears. There are some more in there that were still too green to pick. The Wamneheza corn is maturing now, but there were only two ears I came across that were drying. That one also would have benefited from being planted later as it suffered from the cold spring and weed issues. Oh well. I will get plenty for seed and I have quite a bit saved from last year.
The Iroquois White Flour, Dakota Rainbow Flint, and multi-colored dent (From Michel Lacham) that were planted later are doing much better. The soil they were planted in was tilled multiple times, hoed and hilled around the plants, and as a result the corn is in great shape and will produce (barring animal damage) really well. They have great cob set fairly high up the stalks which should help prevent raccoon and rodents from getting too much of it.
The short-season green beans I planted to replace the paprika peppers earlier in the year gave me a few hand fulls of beans. Something had walked the row and eaten the tops off of a lot of the plants. Not much I can do about that until hunting season.
Really wore myself out on Saturday and I am paying for that today. My body just is exhausted and uncooperative. Guess even I need a day of rest on occasion.
