Nearly October

Hello, all. I promise I have not dropped off the planet. Busy week last week. 'Tis the time of year for pretty fall weeds to bloom on the farm:

Ned has been sick. We thought he'd been snake-bit, but instead he'd scraped his chest on some sharp farm object, developed a bit of an abscess, felt quite puny, visited the vet, been on meds, and nearly recovered. He loathes being on a line instead of free in his field.

Our cayenne pepper plants finally decided they would do something with their lives.

 

Aren't they pretty? 

And we have a couple other not-so-fiery pepper plants that are performing.

The white peppers and some deep black/purple ones come from those two plants.

Did you see those tomatoes up there? Yep -- we still have a handful coming in! 

We have two plants still bearing:

One is (I think) a Black Plum, and it's large with lots of fruit, but ...

Its fruit rots on the vine. Meh. Not planting that one again.

This other one, however, is doing well. Its fruit is good. Not too shabby for Nearly October! And considering that my first tomato was eaten on June 1st -- four months of tomatoes!

Adam planted sweet peas in the old tomato beds.

He used leftover peas from spring in the bed above, and only two plants came up.

But in the bed below he used new Wando peas from the farm store,

 and they've come up much better.

Our asparagus is doing well for its first few months! 

I love it when things I started in the greenhouse actually succeed.

This is a crazy volunteer gourd plant on an old cucumber trellis.

I'm hoping since these gourds have good ventilation and sun, they will ripen and not rot.

Adam also put in some lettuces and collards for the fall. 

Some are in this long raised bed. You can just begin to see them.

These are in the old hoop bed where lettuces were before.

 I think we'll have some autumn salads!

We've had a bad watermelon year. All of them so far had blossom end rot -- 

low calcium in the soil, we think. These last two look good so far, 

but Ned will probably eat them when he can roam around again.

We also valiantly tried a few more bean plants. We had no success with beans this year. 

But these couple of vines seem to be healthy.

 However, I'm not gettingmy hopes up about actually eating beans from them.

Beans have disappointed me too many times before!

Our two horseradish plants look quite happy.

Adam had some dirt in the back of his truck -- good, compost dirt -- 

and he dumped it out on this piece of plastic. 

A few days later we noted that many little

 squash/cucumber/gourd seedlings arose from it. 

It is too late in the year for you poor little things! We will not let you grow and vine your way around half the yard.
The chickens are good. The bees are good, if not overburdened with honey stores this wet year. The worms got too hot in August (didn't we all?), and their numbers declined sharply. We will replenish our population of worms.
That's it from the farm!

The Fall Garden

This week Adam is working hard to transition into our fall garden. That means ripping out all the tomato plants:

 They were still bearing, but they were massacred by horn worms and other pests, and the fruit was awful-looking.

 I made one more quart of good tomato sauce from a last picking, and then the plants went into the compost.
He also removed the first cucumber bed ... nice and clean now!

He's put Wando sweet peas in these three beds. We discovered in early summer that we could eat about as many peas as we could grow, haha!
And he nourished the soil with Worm Tea from our worm bin.

"Black Gold! Texas Tea!"

The asparagus is looking fine. In the other small raised bed, and in the old cucumber bed, he'll plant lettuces and spinach for autumn salads.

Today he's also weed-eating the bean mounds. Our beans were pitiful this year, in spite of doing a second planting. Molested by bugs at first, they did recover, and they've bloomed, etc., but never really yielded many good beans.

Our pepper plants are bearing well now:

But one of them is decimated by something eating away at it. Not sure what.

Our second planting of zucchini and squash are looking quite healthy -- they are on the far left in the photo below:

 Oh -- the purpose of the photo above is also to show that we didn't rip out absolutely all of the tomato plants. We have about six plants left that are still bearing well. We kept them.
And our two horseradish plants are looking fabulous now that Adam ripped out the old broccoli plants around them:

The dogs love to play while Adam works.

But Beau sometimes tires of these antics and hides under the truck.

While Adam poured Worm Tea into the beds, I sat in a chair in the shade and perused our little farm that he's worked so hard on. He is the labor; I am the photographer, chicken lady, and occasional help. Here's a short video, complete with road noise and insects humming:

It's so peaceful sitting there. I'm very thankful for where we live.

More on chickens and hostas in the next post!

Beating the Heat

Today's high is only 94. (It's been higher, nearly 100.) The heat index is 105, and there's a heat advisory until this evening. A heat advisory pops up on my accuweather alert nearly every day. So ... farm work is hot. Adam is up early; I'm not an early bird. But this morning even I was up-and-at-'em at 7:00. I was determined to find a way for Rooster Cogburn to be outside again.

 Adam rigged up a corner of the chicken yard with some fencing to keep the hens away from him. He was happy to be outside again!

He has food and water and some corner shade. He's trying hard to wiggle through the fence, but it's been a couple of hours and he's still unsuccessful, so I think we're good!

I strolled over to the greenhouse to see my few seedlings coming up. Asparagus is looking good:

Adam's new asparagus bed is about 3 feet by 5 feet:

The strawberry bed (we have no strawberry plants yet) is 2 feet by 6 feet.

Both will be filled with a combination of worm castings (our worms are doing fabulous!), compost, and a little sand. It's gorgeous stuff -- crumbly, loose, dark.

Adam is very eager to begin his compost-making this fall. He loves making dirt. Last fall and winter I watched him, day after day, and wondered if he was just using it for therapy. And although he did enjoy it, and it did soothe his soul, it's also extremely useful on the farm to have a big supply of beautiful dirt.
I used that dirt to begin some yellow squash and zucchini seeds (left and middle) and more blue lake green beans.

I attempted starting some annual flowers from seed. Only the coleus did well, and it's massive. I have it in rectangular pots on the front porch.

 My pretty eucalyptus tree is doing  so well. Oh, and that round thing in the middle of the photo is a rose hip on one of my bushes by the front porch. I need to figure out when and how to prune them. They're very leggy.

 Adam drove the truck up with a load of compost mulch for the herb garden. Several herbs have given up the ghost for the year; it's too hot. But some are thriving, notably the lemongrass (far left), basil (right), thyme, oregano, and some others.

It's 10:15, and Adam is done for the morning. He came inside, sweaty and gross. He also did a little mowing and compost work in the veg. garden. And we picked cucumbers and tomatoes and the put the latter in the dehydrator. His big dehydrator is coming along. The "plans" he got for it online from NC State University (oops!!) Appalachian State were just plain awful. He says the best they did was give him the right shape - haha! So he's having to make the final portions himself -- the doors and drawers and racks. But until late afternoon ... rest.