Mother's Day Farm

Happy Mother's Day!
It's 6:00 a.m. A little sprinkly rain is welcome this morning. The pasture lies under a thin blanket of clover and buttercups still, and the pecan boughs overhead make everything lush green.
The spinach is bolting.

 The peas are coming along nicely. We "trellised" them this year using the string trellising method that worked so well with tomatoes and cucumbers. It does NOT WORK with peas! They don't like to grab onto the strings; they need something sturdier.

 Lots of lovely lettuce this year, and we've enjoyed salads many evenings.

 I bought only two tomato seed packets (Amish Paste and Matt's Wild Cherry) from Johnny seed company. They ALL germinated, and I have over 200 tomato cells, 2 plants per cell. ((sigh))
The paste plants have grown quickly.

 If I can't give them away, we'll compost the extra plants. I don't have enough room in my garden beds for them all.
The cherry tomato plants will soon be going in this bed (below) that is overgrown with weeds.
The bed covered in straw has potato plants coming up nicely.

 Adam has finished lining all the raised beds in metal. It's hard work, but will cut down on weeds in the future. The bed on the right (below) should already have cucumber seeds in it, but I'm slow. The bed next to it has spinach (bolting), collards and kale (why do we plant them, again?) and peas on the other end.

 And here is our garden friend. We've each seen him once. He's about 4 feet long, and I'm hoping he keeps the rabbits out of the garden. He's just a harmless black snack, and very docile. He's far from the chickens, so no worries there.

 I'm still painting cards. I sold 8 cards at the market yesterday (Yippee!!!) This is a chicken card I painted this week and it sold yesterday.

 It makes me extremely happy to see my little artwork walking away down the street in the hand of somebody who will do something happy with it :)

Adam and I went to Williamsburg for the last time on our annual passes. I told their gardeners, who were weeding so nicely, that they could come to my house next. This (below) is the terraced veggie garden beside the governor's palace.

 Adam planted a plantain bed for me, and it's doing very well.

 I think this is the last photo I took of Arthur, our rooster. He was a very mean, aggressive rooster, and I think it led to his demise.

 On Thursday Adam found a few feathers near the garden gate, and then a little mound of feathers at the base of a pecan tree. Arthur was gone. We never found him, so I think he started a fight with Ned, leapt over the pasture fence for a duel, realized his opponent, and skeedaddled behind the barn and over the back fence into the wide world. Poor fella. I don't miss him much; I always had to carry a very large stick around him. But his hens are now at a loss of how to conduct themselves. He was always in charge and told them all what to do!
I bought a small elderberry at a plant sale. Adam made a big tire bed for it, and it's doing wonderfully! I want to make elderberry jam.

 I sold all my basil plants at the market this year, a very good year. I saved 27 plants for my herb beds so Adam can make basil salads for us this summer. They were all started from last year's seeds that I saved.

The basil plants grow nearly 4 feet tall. I let them go to seed and dry thoroughly, and then harvest the seed heads and freeze them to use again early next spring ... to start the process all over again. When I stand in the garden in December next to those tall, dead plants, it's hard to believe they hold so much life in them. My hand smells strongly of basil after clasping the long, brown stalk and pulling my fist along it to strip the seeds off. We enjoy the bright, tasty leaves all summer, and that's good. But perhaps the most important gift the basil plant gives us is the seeds, which nobody notices. Most people would pull the dead plants from the soil and toss them on the burn pile. When you garden, consider the dead plants. Look at their tiny seeds. And think of spring!

December Farm

Hello, farm friends. Not much happening on the farm these days. December is such a perfect, quiet time in the South. Today was on the warm side -- 72 degrees for a high. It was lovely being outside. Adam is hauling beautiful composted soil to put on my herb beds, fortifying them for the year to come.

He also raked and hauled piles of decayed pine straw for the shade beds beside the house.

Later he'll cover that with fresh pine straw too, and that bed will be tidy for winter too.

I went hunting for plantain.

The warm weather and the hurricane caused many plants to have a resurgence this fall. I picked plantain, dandelion, and yarrow.

 This was early, and they were wet with dew. I dried them on towels.

plantain (left and top), yarrow (center bottom), dandelion (right)

 A blogging friend who is most kind and generous peaked my interest in making tinctures, a natural progression from all the other things I enjoy making. Tinctures are liquors (usually) infused with herbs for weeks and taken in small doses for many ailments. Here, my morning herbs are beginning their close relationship with a quart of vodka. Plantain and dandelion are good for the gut, and yarrow helps prevent cold and flu.

 My friend sent me some tincture herbs, which I used last week to make a tincture of passion flower, kava kava, and skullcap. It's good for anxiety. I turn them each day.

I strolled the farm, the garden. I realized that if you have land, you always have food, if you know where to look. We have greens in abundance on the farm, although they look like weeds. Sorrel, for instance, is a fine edible plant. I chewed on a pretty plantain leaf today to sooth a toothache.

volunteer sorrel in the garden

 All the herbs in my bed could be eaten in a salad. It's a comfort to know that we're not really dependent on WalMart for our sustenance.

I've only seen thoroughly black wooly bears this year, and our squirrels are stealing every available pecan and stripping the pine cones down to their spines. They must be stocking up for a cold winter. Today, it feels so mild. I should've pulled my Christmas decorations from the garage ... I really should've, rather than waiting for a freezing cold day. But I haven't decorated yet. It's a pensive time of year for me still, that autumnal pensiveness, rather than the December feeling of festivity. None of the children are coming here for Christmas this year, and I'm finding it hard to decorate. Well, that ... and the fact that all the stuff is in the garage. I need two Christmas boxes instead of ten, and I need to keep them handy :)

Lady Grey, a silkie

 The hens say hello!

Brownie, Penny, Sylvie, Sheena, and Arthur's tail feathers.

Circles and Such

 I'm still spinning. Combing, dizzing, and spinning are calm activities.
Plying, dying and wrapping the yarn into skeins are exciting activities.
These two skeins are in an avocado dye.

 On the other side of the stove my homemade chai is reducing.

 Instead of throwing out this celery stump, I'm growing it in the windowsill. I did one last fall and now have a large celery plant, waiting to be transplanted into the garden this spring.

 I can't take much credit for the Bee Balm that is my small business's best seller. Everybody loves it and wants more. I'm shipping five tubs off to New York City today.

 The concoction below, however, is a new product: Healing Herb Ointment. It's a bit greasy, and it smells earthy. But oh-my-goodness ... is it full of good stuff!

 In addition to all these lovely oils and butter and wax, it's infused with plantain, yarrow, and dandelion.

My baby thyme plants are growing.

 One more circle from my house -- this large plate. My mother gave it to me. It was gifted her by an elderly lady whose parents were missionaries in China long ago. The plate came from them, and who knows how old it is and where it came from before that.

 If you don't follow my other blog, here are a few shots of the nearly-finished kitchen. All the shelves are up on the stove-side!

 One more long shelf will go up on the sink-side (below). But the shelves are full now, and the kitchen looks homey.

 Our local thrift store is rearranging for spring, but I found these jars amid the chaos. Those are 1/2 gallon Mason jars, at 50 cents apiece. I was chuffed, as the British say!

Otherwise, farm life is slow now because it's still cold. Freezing temps (just barely) at night, and windy during the day, and cold. I'm eager to put all these herbs in the ground ... but not yet. Not yet.

Everything's Growing But My Bank Balance

Adam just walked in from the garden and said, "You know that wild grapevine on the back garden fence? It's loaded with grapes!"

The back fence is out of control. I don't know what large shrub is under the grapevine, but it's growing on top of it in the sun, as vines love to do. Little clusters of grapes are All Over It. Adam's back there now, whacking off some to produce better grapes. I imagine the birds will find them too.

We've had no success with our grapevines in the "orchard" because they don't get enough sun.
We put some of our Wando peas on a trellis of 4" welded wire, and they are standing upright and beautiful.

They're easy to harvest. But we ran out of that welded wire and thought we'd make some wattle fencing, remember? This is what inadequate wattle fencing will do to your peas:

Next year it's welded wire all the way. We've still harvested bags of peas so far and have a long way to go. A good year for peas. You pick them when they look fat and plump like a sausage but haven't started drying out yet.

Some of my tomato plants have early blight. See it? We pulled about ten beautiful, full plants right out of the bed and threw them on the burn pile :(

The trellising system thus far is excellent for tomatoes.

Can you see how the cord curls around the main tomato stem? It's easy then to gently wrap it around a little more every day or two as the plant grows.
I had a few random volunteer tomato plants in pots. They nearly died when we went on vacation. I put them into the beds where I'd ripped out the sickly tomato plants. They're so short the cords don't reach them yet!

My two rows of bush bean plants are coming up nicely, much better than last year. I probably have them way too close together, but I overplanted because last year I had such bad luck with their germination.

 I'll plant more beans in stages so they don't all come in at the same time.
Here are two volunteer cucumber plants that sprouted in Adam's compost

 Several of these early volunteers already have baby cukes starting on them. They will go in beds later.

 A volunteer tomato and cuke are in one compost pile,
and a volunteer cuke and watermelon are in another.

 

 These are perhaps my healthiest volunteer tomatoes -- three plants that sprouted up from the chicken poop compost pile intended to enrich the asparagus. I wrapped a piece of leftover fence around them for support.

 I guess that chicken poop's not going anywhere for a while!
And speaking of watermelons, Adam filled two more tire planters in the garden and I planted watermelon seeds in there. What do you bet the volunteer watermelon does better? Yep.

 And Adam's willow tree sprig is doing fine in a bigger pot. He will put it in the ground soon.

 In the greenhouse (which is a true hot house these days), I'm starting herbs. I want to start herbs from seed and sell the plants at the farmers' market. Nobody does this, and I think there's a need for it. And unlike cut herbs, the plants only improve week to week. I don't like selling "perishable" items at the market. Any herbs that don't sell I'll simply put in my own herb garden if it gets too big. Below are basil, thyme, tarragon, parsley, and sage, waiting to be born in their little earthen nurseries.

 Many friends responded to my plea for pots!! I really needed the small pots -- the next stage up from the starter cells. I prefer plastic pots; the paper ones leach water away from the little plants' roots.

 There's an issue with little plastic pots. I challenge you to try to find them for sale at WalMart, Lowe's, or your local farm or hardware store. I'm referring to what I wanted: a pack of about ten 2" pots -- plastic ones. I looked and looked. Adam said (as Adam often says), "Let's check online." And we could've bought them online for 30 cents per pot! That's just too much to pay for a very small plastic pot! And if I'm selling my herb plants, that adds quite a bit to the cost per plant.
One day I was roaming in a favorite store, Dollar Tree. Everything in there really is just $1.00. And look what I found!

A pack of twelve little plastic pots -- perfect! -- for $1.00! So I bought 12 packs, of course. Items appear and disappear forever at those dollar stores. Those 144 pots, plus all the donations from friends, will give me pots for years :)
So far I have basil and some early dill to sell.

I think I have a bit of a green thumb when it comes to starting plants, plus I do enjoy it so much. If I could make any money doing that, I would be a happy woman.
Because ... I decided a few months ago to stop working at my part-time afternoon job at an afterschool program for children. It's a lovely place, and I will miss it, but physically it is so taxing. I'm on concrete/asphalt, very active, for 3 hours straight, and it's hard on my bad veins. It wears me out every day and makes me non-productive in the evenings. Even though I don't go to work until about 2:30, it dominates my day from lunch onward. I will still substitute there some, but not every single day. I only have 13 days left! Then I will be a free woman to focus my attentions on my soap/lotion/yard business, and on increasing the productivity of the farm in small ways like selling herbs. So ... here's to new enterprises!