Plastic Keeps Us Warm

 Lookie what happened this morning! The plastic went on the hoop house.

 It's much thicker and sturdier than last year's plastic. It's also more clear and see-through.
He'd already put on the channels and used wiggle-wire again to make the plastic sheeting fit tightly.

 This new hoop house is about the same height as the last one, but it is four feet longer and three feet wider. So there's room in the middle for a little aisle. Adam plans to put these three barrels in there with boards on top to make a table top down the middle. The barrels are a bit too tall for that, so he will bury them in the ground a little. If the barrels are full of water, it helps the greenhouse to maintain a better temperature.

 The hoop house will also have shelves down both sides like last year.
One improvement is the back window. Adam framed a real window with plastic sheeting instead of glass.

 Last year he bought this neat window-opening device on sale. It's temperature controlled. When the hoop house gets too hot, it will automatically open the window to cool things off. That way if we're gone to church or town, we won't bake our little seedlings.

Sad news: Ethel the hen is dead. She flew out of the orchard (naughty girl), and Ned got hold of her and worried her to death. It is rather upsetting, not because I was very attached to her. (She was one of my Barred Rocks and the most stand-offish of the hens.) But it's troubling because we must really figure out how we can have chickens on the farm that can somehow coexist with Ned. Clearly we need higher fencing around the orchard.

I have about a half-dozen jonquils/daffodils blooming now, hiding under the large fig tree. Day lilies are coming up, as are hyacinths. And one hardy fern has little fiddleheads emerging. My hardy amaryllis also is doing beautifully -- last year's single bulb is shooting up about ten spears this spring!

Oh! One more thing. Adam talked yesterday with a young man who grew up in this area and knew the previous owner of our farm, Mr. Mahe, the Frenchman. He was able to tell Adam that the fenced area we're calling the orchard, was never an orchard. It was Mr. Mahe's veggie garden. It was fenced (of course) to keep his miniature horses and donkeys out of it. It did have the espaliered apple trees around the perimeter, as it does now, but the raised rows were never for any fruit trees. Now I feel better that we did not lose fruit trees that never were there in the first place, haha!

On a serious note, Adam got a few quotes from roofers for getting a new asphalt roof on our house. Right now, we simply cannot afford it and must defer a new roof until another year and keep living with the occasional drips from the living room ceiling. It's been 18 months now, and much of the work on the house is "on hold" until we can get the roof in order. But it's a big-ticket item, and at least right now, some medical issues for Adam and me are squeezing the cash out of our budget. We are learning to be patient!

Spring into Summer

First, peas. They are fading. These are the English peas, which we've enjoyed so much.

We've decided that next year, we want LOTS more of these. They are sweet to eat right off the plant, excellent cooked, and easy to preserve by freezing. The sugar snaps, on the other hand, are okay to eat fresh, but are awful when cooked, and cannot be frozen. We want very few of them next year.
Second, tomatoes. This morning, these ten plants were all I had left in the greenhouse! And a spindly lot they were.

I had 65 plants in the two long beds, about another dozen in cages, and then I put a handful in two of the compost beds. I just dug out a little hole and plopped them in. They won't get much sun there, but the soil can't be beat! See them in there, mingling with a random gourd plant?

Here are more in another compost bin also occupied by some happy onions.

But I still had homeless tomatoes. So Adam dug some holes along the orchard fence. There's sun, but the soil was utterly unamended. Ah well. Twenty-two plants went in there:

I'm not quite sure, but I think that got me up to about 111 tomato plants in dirt.
But I still had those ten plants left. I stuck them in random spots on the back of the pea trellises where the peas are starting to fade. That makes 121 plants ... I think. We will be swimming in tomatoes.
Speaking of random gourd plants, three sprang up right on top of the dead puppies' graves.

Look at that! This is so appropriate because Sandy and Maggie loved playing with those small gourds that I brought back from my brother's farm. They played with them like balls until they fell apart, and the seeds inside were strewn about the pasture. Three were left in the soil of their graves by them, before they ever died.
The tomatoes in the second bed are looking so good. The Matt's Wild Cherry plants are just spreading out and so healthy with lot of fruit.

 This is a terrible photo of its fruit, but it's so pretty.

Surprisingly the Black Prince tomato is bearing lovely fruit; the Black Princes in the first bed did very badly, and we ripped them out.

One of the Blue Lake beans is sending out runner shoots. Adam will put up strings for it to grab a hold.

The scuppernong grapes are growing like crazy, and I have found a few teeny-weeny clusters of grapes on there. So cute!

Regarding the orchard, we've been studying those trees, wondering what type they are. You can examine bark and peer at leaves, but sometimes you just have to wait for the fruit, to figure out what something is. People can be that way too.

Well, this big tree, which we thought was an apple, is probably a pear.

Whatdya think? Pear-shaped?

And the tree we were so hoping was a peach because of how it was pruned? It's definitely an apple.

Otherwise, my most mature Cherry Chocolate tomato has great fruit. Soon it will be ripening. The corn is well up, about 8" tall. I've put both pumpkin type seedlings into their mounds. I put the cayenne pepper seedlings into the same bed as the garlic and lettuce. The final sweet pepper seedlings went right next to the larger plants. Three elephant ear plants joined other shady plants in the large shade bed on the west side of the house.

The greenhouse is now empty. Praise the Lord.

Buttercups and Clover

We haven't been able to bring ourselves to cut it all ... just yet. Yesterday when temperatures reached 80 degrees, the whole field smelled of flowers.

Plus, of course, it's lovely for the bees. Adam's swarm appears to be doing well. He moved it into the place of one of his strong hives, allowing for wind drift too, and the tiny swarm in the brown nuc box has received thousands of new bees.

And then there's Ned, sweet boy:

Softest ears ever

That pic was taken yesterday morning when Adam was cutting down the dead fruit trees in the orchard.

Now we have FOUR burn piles that we must get rid of, one some day when the wind is low and it's recently rained some but not too much.
Speaking of the orchard, the large apple tree is doing this:

                         
And the mysterious tree that we hope is a peach is doing this:

I that an itty-bitty peach? It's fuzzier than the others. You tell me! But I hope so.

The Beautiful Orchard

There was a time last fall when the orchard looked like this: a tangled mass of green on the other side of the pasture fence.

We couldn't see through it. We couldn't walk through it. Beau (poor thing) got trapped in there and Adam had to rescue him! It was that thick.
Here's that same stretch of fence, today.

I'm immensely proud of Adam for the brutally hard work of clearing that piece of ground, and of Peter too, who did a lot of heavy clearing when he was home. I helped, but there's only so much a woman over fifty can do in such a mass of vine-and-pine.
After the initial clearing, the vines on the orchard floor were coming back:

Adam couldn't use his scythe in there because the previous owner had put about 25 metal re-bar stakes in the ground to support the wooden sides of the long raised beds. One good wack on a metal stake and the damage to his scythe would have been serious. So ... he push-mowed it.

I helped by going ahead as an emissary to rid the world of branches and wads of vine. Doesn't it look grand?

I just love it. The only sad thing is that almost all of those trees standing nobly down the center line are DEAD. Ah well. You can't have 'em all!
The grape vines, however, are not dead.

Someday, I'd love to put a table and chairs in the orchard to have tea while the apple blossoms are blowing around in April. Please come!

Emancipation in the Orchard

It's easy to forget that just a few months ago, the orchard looked like this:

A week or so ago, this photo shows the west fence where about a dozen 

espaliered apple trees were wrapped in vines and thorns.

We've made steady progress on freeing those trees along the fence. They are the bulk of our apple crop, and I want them in sun and fresh air before the spring. Today Adam and I rescued four more trees. A fifth tree was dead already.
The fence row today:

Hmm. I was hoping there would be more of an obvious difference between the two photos! There's more blue sky showing at the end of the row. I guess that represents all the work we've done. Sigh!
For what it's worth, we've emancipated about ten trees thus far. My hands hurt from the thorns, in spite of good work gloves. I'm hopeful for our apple prospects.
We decided to put a burn barrel inside the orchard for getting rid of debris. There is so much debris! Branches and vines to kingdom come!

This is a good example of a portion of the fence. Do you see the fence in there? Do you see the pitiful apple tree, whimpering for help? Well, they're in there!

Here is one of the healthier ones we rescued today. But all that mass of weed trees and vines on either side will undoubtedly try to take over again. Constant vigilance is required.

The burn barrel turned white with heat. We barely made a start on all that we need to burn in the orchard.

Update: I counted yesterday. There are 15 emancipated trees around the fence line. We have two more to free. I'm excited about that.

Getting Busy on the Farm

Tuesday:
Spring feels just around the corner, and when I see bulbs just about to burst, I know it's true.

That means we don't have much time to get a lot done on the farm.
Adam's making plans to add boxes to his beehives and feed the bees. This year we will have the bees produce honey to sell. He'll use that money to buy hive frames (the big expense) so he can increase the number of hives next year.

Water collection is still a priority, and the rain is falling as I type. Adam set up our old soft-side swimming pool as a water collection tank. I forget why it's preferable to the red metal tank; perhaps because it has more nozzles and such already installed in it, for siphoning water out.

Maggie helps inflate the top ring using our shop vac.

Adam ran hose all the way from the back of the barn where the water butts are, into the pool.

I go in the orchard about every day to check on the trees. We're pretty sure the tree in the front of the orchard is a peach tree. I found leaves on her today!

And a fat bud:

Adam gave her one last quick pruning:

She's a lonely peach tree. To get fruit, we need two peach trees. Unfortunately the other peach tree looks like this:

It's as dead as the post it's tied to.

Adam is busy preparing all the beds that he'll need, once our seedlings are ready to be set outside. Today he put together a trellis (of sorts) for cucumbers, squash, and other vining veggies. He made it from an old metal frame he found on the back of the property. He attached some chicken wire to it.

Here it is, set up in its bed, attached securely to its posts.

See what he used to join all the chicken wire together? Clever man! One thing's for sure ... grapevine is something we have LOTS of.
We'll have high winds and perhaps tornadoes in the area this afternoon (Wednesday), so Adam is outside battening down the hatches, as they say. Tell me -- do we use the verb "batten" in any other context in our language other than "batten down the hatches"?
Thursday morning -- We survived the stormy weather and strong winds. The greenhouse is intact!