Tomatoes Forever

I'm still having issues logging in from home, which makes posting super-extra irregular.

The growing season is extra long this year, with unusually warm (and, unfortunately, dry) weather.  This means that even though I started my tomatoes kinda late, I'll have some ripe ones this year.  Yay!  One of my customers at work has already harvested about a five gallon bucket worth out of his garden.

I think this is the first year in three years (or more) that I've had ripe tomatoes.  Cold, wet springs have done them in.  The last time I had ripe tomatoes I kept the seedlings in my greenhouse practically forever, potting them up all the way up into gallon pots before I set them in the ground.  And they were fantastic that year.

Which makes me want to build a permanent greenhouse even more, one big enough to safely house a small propane heater to keep them toasty at night.  Because life is too short to go without home-grown tomatoes with the exception of an occasional good year here or there.

My DH and I have been making tasty lettuce-free salads a lot lately.  Here's one of my favorite variations:

Chop into bite-sized pieces: two tomatoes.  Place in a medium/large bowl, drizzle with about a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper to taste, and stir.
Chop up/slice:  one cucumber, two sticks of celery, half a green pepper, half a cup of black olives, half a cup of green olives, and 1-2 tablespoons (or more if you like heat) pepperoncinis.  Place ingredients as you chop them on top of the tomatoes but don't stir until the end of the recipe.

Add a pinch of salt, pepper to taste, two tablespoons of pepperoncini juice, 1 tablespoon of olive juice, and a pinch of dill.  Add 1/4 to 1/2 cup of crumbled feta cheese and 1/4 cup of shredded cheddar.  Toss salad, taking care to make sure the tomatoes are all mixed in well, and serve immediately.

Weeds, Tea and Soup

The garden is growing really, really well.  Too well, in some cases.  Can you have too much bok choi? Apparently so.  Sadly, the goats don't like it, which I find weird, but useful in that the deer haven't bothered it at all.  I guess I have to eat faster.  Something to think about--bok choi, when cooked, forms a nice, not-too-thick gel.  It might be a good ingredient for soups.  If an experiment comes out all right along those lines, I'll post about it.

Anyway, I noticed something that produced a duh moment for me.

I have areas in my garden where not just the plants, but the weeds are positively huge.  It made me realize that the places that have small weeds are under-fertilized.  Sooo ... when I put the beds to sleep (heh) in the fall, when I put down my homemade fertilizer and cover things over, I can put extra in the places where the weeds are really pitiful, and less where they're gargantuan.

Not that I'll have weeds, of course.  Everything will be perfectly manicured and weeded by then.

But if I did have weeds, I could totally use them as a gauge for how much fertilizer to put down.  Aaaand, the beauty part, if I overdo it in the fall, its not going to burn my veggies because I won't have any in the ground at the time.  It'll have time to mellow for many months before I plant again.  Remember, though, if you add amendments in the fall, if they're super water soluble, they'll just wash away into the soil too deep for the plants to reach them in spring, so either protect against rain or just wait until after your seedlings sprout in the spring.  Don't fertilize when you plant seeds.  It messes them up when they germinate.  If you must, scratch the fertilizer in at least six inches, preferably farther, away from your seed line.

Speaking of fertilizer, I have a scary bucket of chicken poo waiting by.  I haven't decided what to do with it.  It's super hot, and only partially composted.  I'm tempted to spread it between the smallest of my zucchini plants and maybe make tea with some of it to water with around the fruit trees.  Chicken poo is awesome fertilizer, but you have to be careful.  It burns, baby, burns!  There's really no way to measure how hot it is, so I'll have to guess.  In cases like that, it's good to remember that you can always add, but you can't take away the damage from too much once it's done.  It's not like too much salt in your soup, where you can stick in a couple of celery stalks or add potatoes to fix it.

Soup again.  I must be craving it.  I think I'll make soup for dinner tonight.

Watch out for the weather.  Stay hydrated in hot spots, and look out for lightning.  We had an incredible lightning storm just east of us.  It sounded like fireworks show off in the distance, and for a while I thought that's exactly what it was, a post-4rth show, until I looked out the window.  Often there were multiple flashes at once.  We don't usually get that kind of weather around here.  I was very, very glad I could appreciate it at a distance instead of being directly under it.  It must have been terrifying.  Here's the weather report for it.  Photos here.  BTW, it takes three to four hours for me to drive from my home to the worst-hit areas of the storm, but I saw the closest edge of it quite well from our deck.

Twins and Other Surprises

We had a few surprises over the last week. First came the cute little twin tomatoes. So adorable, and tasty too! They weren't just attached by the green. The skins were connected too.

Then we had a double yolker egg. These actually happen pretty often. Grandma House (my mom) got a double yolker in the last batch of eggs we sent her. Young hens tend to make mistakes like that while their bodies learn how to make eggs. When Chihiro laid her first egg, she forgot to put the yolk and the shell on it. The result looked like a weird white waterballoon. The membrane was really tough, strong enough to bounce on pavement without breaking. The second egg was better. Still no shell, but it had a yolk.

And now she appears to be sharing a nest with our best egg-hider, Sophie!

We were looking for the hens. We lost our rooster to a predator (probably a raccoon but it might be the return of the super-bold coyote) and we were worried when the hens didn't come running up for their mealtime. I don't usually go all the way to the NE corner of the pasture because I can see pretty clearly if there's a chicken there, but this time I went to see if the predator had dug a hole under the fence.

And that's when I found thirty eggs all cuddled up together in a chicken-sized nest.

The girl, when she put them all in a basket, found that some of the ones on the bottom were actually partially buried and had to be dug out.

Sometimes living on a small farm can be painful, sad, frustrating, and even scary.

But some days, a lot of days actually, it's a lot of fun. I'd even go so far as to say hilarious.

I love living on a farm.

Now, the girl and I have a lot of eggs to float-test.

(If you're not sure about how good an egg is, just submerge it in water. If it lays flat, it's fresh. If the nose tips up a bit, it's good to hard boil. Super fresh eggs don't hard boil well because the whites stick to the shell. If the nose points straight up, it's iffy. I might still hard boil it, but I'd probably give it to the dogs all chopped up rather than feed it to a human being. And if it floats--run away! If it bobs on the surface of the water, don't even run. Just carefully--very, very, very carefully--pick the egg up and dispose of it somewhere where the evil smell when it inevitably breaks won't foul up the whole neighborhood. Yech!)

It's Alive!

There's a lot of things to get used to when you move into a rural or semi-rural area.  No natural gas lines.  No DSL.  Spotty or minimal cellphone coverage.  More frequent brown and blackouts (which makes the woodstove more than a decorative item) that tend to last longer than in town.  Deer eating up your garden, not just occasionally, but every frickin' night.  Dozens of bunnies that you scare off as you walk the garden--but they'll be back in a few minutes.  (I had three small bunnies hop out of one of my herb whiskey barrels not long ago when I watered.)  And ...

SPIIIIIIDERS!  This one here is one of my favorites.  It's a garden spider, literally.  I posted pics a long time ago of the very first one I saw, evah.  Now I have quite a few, though despite the fact they're considered common I sure don't see many of them.  I see far more of the orange and black orb spiders.  One of the many fun things about them is the squiggle they weave into their webs.  Some scientists believe it's supposed to imitate a wheat shaft to help fool insects into flying too close.  No one's really sure.  Notice how she lines up the squiggle with the dark line on her body, and how that line design kinda looks like wheat too... or maybe something else.  Or maybe it's all accidental or still a WIP by evolution.  Anyway, if spiders terrify you, don't live in the country.  You won't be able to go into the garden, nor sleep at night.  Plus, there's never anything to do around here.  All I had to do today beside the normal barn chores was move the sicklebar mower, which was out of gas, from the lower property to the garage.  Ho hum.  (gasp, pant!)

In other garden news, huzzah!  Tomatoes at last!

With the cool weather it's been a long, long wait for ripe tomatoes.  The plants are huge, though.  The leaves are packed together very tightly against the fence they're growing up.  They're as tall as I am.  If the tomatoes didn't turn red, I'd never find them in there.  I also have eggplant developing, but the fruit is still pretty small, about the size of a golf ball.  This variety of eggplant doesn't get more than 3" across and stays pretty round, so we're a bit less than halfway there.  Hopefully we'll have plenty of time before serious cold weather sets in.  We still have rhubarb and currants.  We're waiting on grapes, cucumbers and pears.  Apples are done/fallen (the goats are very happy), blackberries are mostly over with (though there are plenty of green ones, once the rains set in the berries are pretty yucky and mold quickly) if not done, marionberries are done, blueberries sort of never arrived but are sort of done, herbs are in bloom and for the most part sub-optimal unless you're a bee, in which case they're perfect.

Pass the Epsom Salt, please

I've been working like a maniac in the garden again (I guess there's a case to be made for writing 'still' rather than 'again'.) Today I put in about ten hours solid. It's looking up out there, but man, there's still so much to do and I can't keep this pace up. So now it's damage control, sort of. There's really no damage when I give up on stuff--just weeds move in and I don't get all the seeds planted that I want to.

Most seeds, with a few exceptions, can hang out for a year or three and get planted during a different year. The germination rate drops to be sure, and you have to store them carefully (cool-ish temps, dry, dark) but otherwise they're a low-maintenance carry over to the next year. Less seed to buy next year, I guess, but I'm a bit disappointed with myself. I mean, come on, if I'd kept up my mental schedule of getting at least one type of seed in the ground every dry, workable soil day once the growing season kicked in I'd be golden right now.

Man, I really want to get corn in this year. Corn doesn't keep very well.

Kami scowls at the computer, trying to think of a reasonable way to get corn in this year.

Kami thinks about a tractor.

Kami's scowl at the computer deepens as she considers the expense of renting a tractor.

Kami thinks about fresh corn grown in her own garden, pesticide free, sweet, and those tall, handsome stalks whispering in the wind.

Kami thinks more about a tractor.

Kami looks at her wallet.

Hey, hand digging isn't that bad, is it?

Ugh. Pass the epsom salt, please. I need to take a hot bath and not think about corn. Ugh! No corn, no corn, no corn--corn corn corn corn corn corn Corn!

I guess we'll have to rent a tractor. Or get the roto-tiller started. Shake shake shake, shake the corn field!