The garden is in!

It has been an eventful week. We finished the garden Monday—everything planted, separated by landscape cloth, protected by row cover, and irrigated by drip lines. Whew. 

East view of the garden with corn and  squash in the foreground (as well as the drip irrigation lines)

West view of the garden with garlic and onions in the foreground, followed by cabbage under row cover and tomatoes in tomato cages.

And, as we were so focused on starting the plants we wanted to grow, the plants we didn’t want to grow took off like gangbusters. Once the garden is in, the weeding begins. Monday afternoon, I went to work on a patch of star thistle growing in the hay field. Thistles have roots that go down to China, and you can never, ever get to the bottom of them. I repeat the wisdom that Terry shared with me years ago—if you deprive a plant of its photosynthetic surface often enough, it will eventually die.

I went to work on Tuesday to clean my office and give my poor body a rest.

Wednesday I was back at it, cutting curly dock out of the prairie restoration. I am excited that there are lots of plants out there that weren’t there before. There is brome grass, and orchard grass, and clover, but there are also a number of forbs that I don’t recognize. I will have to identify them as they flower. I thought there was quite a lot of giant ragweed and started pulling them. I noticed, however, that these alleged ragweed plants always grew in association with plants that I suspected had been in the seed mix. Also, some of the older leaves had more than three lobes. I stopped pulling and took a sample to the house. When I looked up giant ragweed, I found that the leaves were opposite. The look alike clearly had alternate leaves.

Curly dock cannot be pulled. It has multiple taproots that take off in all directions. It has to be dug out. Sometimes several crowns spring Medusa-like from a single root mass. I spent two hours on it Wednesday and got everything that I saw. Digging out curly dock is an excellent abdominal workout. When I went out Saturday, I observed that there was at least one I missed. I’ll get it tomorrow.

The evergreen trees are having a great year. Terry is pleased at how well they are growing. In this photo, this year's growth is the lighter green. 

Amazing amount of new growth on this spruce tree (the lighter green)

One morning, three deer walked right by the house. I wasn’t able to get one picture of all of them, so I will only post the best picture. Terry and I had different opinions on this event. I rushed around getting my camera to capture this awesome nature moment. Terry exclaimed, “Them sons of bitches! They’re headed straight for the Honeycrisp!”

Deer in the yard early one morning

And we have this skunk that wanders around in broad daylight, which is a concern because it usually means the animal is sick.

A less welcome visitor

The hummingbirds visit frequently. I mostly get silhouettes. I keep trying to capture his ruby throat in the right light. 

Mr. Hummingbird

Mrs. Hummingbird

Today, Dad pointed out two large birds in the field across the road. He thought they were turkeys, but the spotting scope showed them to be turkey vultures feeding on a very stiff raccoon carcass.

Turkey vulture and stiff raccoon.

Terry ordered 144 apple maggot bags as an experiment. Wednesday afternoon we went out to install them. They are really just short nylon stockings that cover the apple and prevent flies from laying eggs on them. I followed the directions and put a knot in the open end around the apple’s stem, leaving ample room for the apple to expand. Terry’s strategy was to slip the stocking over the apple and tie the open end with the closed end. This was faster than my method but leaves virtually no room for expansion. Men know so little about nylons. I pointed out the problem, to which Terry replied, “I’m going to keep checking them.” Whatever.

My method of putting the maggot bag on the apple

Terry's method

Thursday I took on replacing the tarps on the shade shelters in the chicken run. We had landscape cloth on them before which, with the help of curious chickens, had unraveled in the extreme. Terry volunteered some pieces of discarded yurt canvas that he saved from his previous job. He said it wouldn’t unravel. He didn’t tell me about the weird shapes and the zipper. And I would need to put grommets in it. “But I have all the stuff,” he said.

I got my grommet training and set about cutting the pieces to size. The zipper pull had already been cut off. It would never stay shut by itself, particularly with chickens pecking at it. I resolved to sew the end shut. I found a sturdy needle and some upholstery thread in my sewing kit. As soon as I tried to get the needle through the fabric around the zipper, I realized I should have also gotten a thimble. Being too lazy to go back into the house, I tried using a scrap of yurt tarp to protect my thumb. The scrap slipped; the threaded end of the needle poked into my thumb to a depth of 3 mm. The combination of excruciating pain and dumb-ass stupidity made me want to just go back to bed for the rest of the day. But I did the grownup thing and went into the house for a bandage and a thimble.

With the zipper sewn up, I pressed on to the installation of the grommets. I drilled holes in the canvas, put a washer on a grommet, and put the grommet through the hole. Using tapered metal rods, I hammered the open end of the grommet over the edges of the holes with varying levels of success. I found that if the grommet split in two places, it was perfect. I also found that the plywood Terry had given me to work on was much too soft, as the grommet sunk into it rather than bending. I found a piece of metal in the tractor shed and made better progress after that. The project took the whole morning, which I didn’t plan on. I took a long lunch break.

New prayer flags and shelters. Note zipper on the right shelter.

Grommet detail. 12 per shelter.

I installed the new shelters as well as new prayer flags, as the old flags were all faded and had run out of prayers. The run looks very nice now, and I can devote myself to pulling weeds until the harvest begins. I did the second pass of removing thistles from the asparagus bed. Unlike the thistles in the hay field, which seem to be an isolated patch, these thistles spring up from runners of thistles next to the road like Starbucks franchises supported by the prosperous home office. I’ll never get all of them. Nevertheless, there is a satisfaction in seeing the asparagus bed clean, even if it is an ephemeral pleasure.