Potting On Peppers

Yesterday I really looked at my greenhouse plants. Many are stressed. My poor watermelons, that came up so beautifully in early March, are ridiculously crowded in their plastic trays. Next year: start watermelons at the end of April! They might end up being the first starts I actually have to toss in the compost pile. It's all part of the learning curve.

I also looked at my peppers and realized they had not grown much for probably the last week or two. Unlike the tomatoes, which leafed out until their leaves covered their neighbors', the peppers reached a certain size and simply stopped.

So priority one, on rising this morning, was to pot on the peppers.

By early afternoon, all 210 peppers were in 4" blocks, and I had reduced my 1700 pound bag of potting soil to a small enough amount that I could move it by hand. One hundred pounds left, perhaps? (Which is, really, just about perfect. That will produce hundreds of smaller blocks, just right for sauerkraut cabbage that I need to plant in a couple of months.)

Then I headed out to transplant greens. I had very sparse trays of cilantro, lettuce, and rainbow chard (which, I was delighted to see, had yellow rootlets and red rootlets, besides the usual white). The onion bed had grown patchy: all the beds in the photo used to be filled with four rows of onions.

I suspect that, since most of the vanished onions were the second seeding, that they dehydrated away, without the stronger root systems of their older siblings to support them. On the other hand, I didn't find any limp onion bits among the clay surface. Perhaps the roaming chickens prefer teeny onion starts over their more mature relatives? Otherwise, how could the onion tops vanish?

In any case, I read yesterday that onions and lettuce are good companions, so it seemed natural to fill in the gaps with new greens. I was all set to plant out basil, too, when I realized that basil grows a good bit taller than butterhead or onion greens, and really wouldn't be quite appropriate.

It was about 4:30 when I realized this, and I suddenly and completely lost all my energy. Perhaps hiking up and down the hills, dragging the garden cart was too much. Maybe all the hauling of water, potting soil, and 21 heavy trays of peppers simply wore me out. Perhaps I need better hydration. Food shouldn't be the issue, as I'd had almost a dozen eggs (with homemade Caesar on top, to get me more fats, which I'm craving right now). Perhaps I should imitate the "real" farmers and rise at 4am to read the Bible, milk the cow, and get breakfast ready in the dark, so I can head to the fields as the sun comes up, but that seems really extreme yet.

Not working outside in the middle of the day does sound pretty appealing, though. So I'll need to figure out how to arrange my day so it works for our family of Night Owls (excepting Jadon, the one early bird in the six Lykoshes).

After a good sit at dinner and a shower to wash off two days of intense planting, I no longer felt like a limp noodle. My ambulatory skills had returned, at least enough to get me the 40 feet from the RV to the house. Phew!

Tomato Craziness

In one of my favorite books about farming, Fields of Plenty, the author visits a farm where the farmer describes things as "out of control." He adds, "No matter how much you plant, it doesn't seem like you can keep up."

That's a bit how I felt when I woke up today. The policy so far is to keep putting out the fires that need it most. In the last three days, well over another 100 tomato plants have grown enough that they were falling over. We got the garden cart cleared out of tools (and a lizard) and I used it to haul six flats of heavy tomatoes from the greenhouse to the field. It was much easier than carrying the flats one by one.

After a full day of work, we have 176 tomatoes in the ground now, and that cleared section is entirely planted. I also planted out some strawflowers and gomphrena.

By comparison: the other side of the road, not yet plowed, tilled, nor planted.

Joe helped some of the time. He put the soil blocks in the holes I made, so I could cover them up. He is my constant, cheerful companion, including this photo, where he's removing his soiled shirt at the end of the day, laughing about how he looks in his new "hat."


After dinner, I took advantage of the later daylight to pot on three flats of flowers. I was astounded to see that tiny flowers with two leaves in a 3/4" soil block had, at times, four or five inches of fine, filament rootlets. I should have potted on a few weeks ago. Sorry, baby plants.

I opened the greenhouse door to leave, and heard the toad hop on the weed barrier floor. I held the door for him and he hopped onto the door frame, and then out into the darkness. I followed my little guest, and couldn't help picking him up, which I had refrained from doing these last days. He was so delicate yet strong, with heaving sides and webbed feet. Beautiful Mr. Toad.

Some other things I like.
The Rhode Island Red hens, along with the white Leghorn and checkered Barred Rock chicks (with a guinea thrown in for good measure). I think the color combination is quite nice.

The dogwoods get more glorious by the day. I had thought their tiny whitish bits were their glory, but I see now that that was simply their buds. Their blooms are huge, white, celebratory.

My purple and green asparagus, planted last year in the trench where we had heeled in our trees, have shot up three feet high.
Some of my brand new raspberry plants have leaves! (As do some blackberries!)

Chunky the pig, hopefully ready for processing in another month or so. Our pigs are happy pigs.

Third Laundry Load in Six Months

Biodynamically speaking, this was a day that was better to do nothing than to do something. And, just a reminder: plan to do no gardening on Friday and Saturday. As Maria Thun says:

From Good Friday to Easter Saturday we do no work in the garden at all. In numerous trials we have repeatedly found that garden work of any kind during this period, including harvest, does plants and people no good. Fewer seeds germinate, fruits are smaller, produce quality is diminished and medicinal herbs have less healing power. However we ponder this question, ultimately we always come back to the conviction that the cosmic event at Golgotha penetrated and imbued the earth, and plants annually participate in this.

This morning when we got up, we had done only two loads of laundry since October. So Phil took the sleeping bags and bags and bags of other clothes and headed out to do laundry. It was about $70 in quarters, but our pillows, sleeping bags, clothes, and milking cloths all smell and look delightful. It's amazing to me that Phil can accomplish, in three or four hours, three months of laundry, including most folding. (Then I spend about the same amount of time sorting the clean clothes and stuffing them into drawers.)

First Obvious Predation

One of the bullets we've dodged so far struck today. We arrived home to find one of our true ranging chickens (who escape the poultry net that protects the majority of the flock), savagely mauled, dead. Was it the local fox? Some other predator? We don't know.

While I took a nap, Phil thought it would be fun to try out the mower attachment on the tractor. He had finished the apple orchard while I slept, and was almost done with the stone fruits (which was, perhaps, a bit tight to use the tractor). It seems odd to cut down green growth, rather than using animals to mow it, but I think the plan is to keep the weeds down in order to allow the grasses and forages to grow well.

The boys used the train set to make an impressive track. They had a great time.

In this photo, the train skirts "the pit of despair," a large hole Jadon has been digging on-and-off for some time.

Phil has lined our driveway with an impressive number of large hay bales. The creative boys, lacking a playset, put a piece of lumber between two, and, after clambering up a bale, go back and forth.

The older two put a safety stipulation on the board: due to tippy-ness, only one boy allowed on at a time.

An Indoor Day

Phil came in from chores this morning with horrendous hiccups, deep painful gulps every couple of seconds. I wondered if there was a homeopathic treatment for hiccups, which is, after all, a muscle spasm, so I dosed him with a remedy for "severe and painful, frequent hiccups." It did nothing. I dosed him with the only other remedy I could think of, for use after eating something toxic.

This time, the reaction was almost immediate. Within about 15 seconds, he vomited violently. The hiccups stopped. Then he went to sleep, and woke intermittently through the day to take more homeopathic Nux Vomica and go back to sleep. All exactly as I would expect from some sort intake. (He had gone out with friends last night and eaten something not farm-prepared that we would have expected to be fine. Apparently, it had some form of MSG.)

The need for recuperative sleep was not bad, though, as outdoor work was impossible today. It rained steadily until about 4pm. We had only half the actual moisture predicted, but the ground is soppy and my transplanted tomatoes are happy.

Jadon and I worked on the Global Puzzle, a challenging puzzle of the world in which the different nations have their own pieces. So South Africa has a South African shaped piece, and Ecuador has an Ecuadorian shaped piece. I remember the first time I did this puzzle, in high school, my Mom said, "I never realized how little of the land mass is below the equator!" It is surprising when you really look at it.

When the rain finally ceased and the sun broke through, I went to check on the bees. Incredibly, they were flying in with their leg pouches full of pollen. How was the pollen not all washed away? How were they ready to do pollen collecting in a world of wet, these little creatures that love the sun and warmth? I was impressed.

And that's the view from the country at the end of this week.

Potato Planting for English Majors

I spent the day dealing with annuals. My cabbages and broccolis, my few mixed greens that have thus survived, are all growing well. First, I formed beds in the tilled soil, using a shovel to create orderly walkways. Then I planted almost 40 tomatoes, ridiculously enormous. We're about three weeks from the last frost date, so the hard truth is that they might not make it. I started them when a local expert recommended, and after eight weeks in the greenhouse, the most vigorous were grown taller than my knees, and yesterday's watering made them tip over.

Since they would die of lack of space soon, I figured I might as well plant them as chuck them. At least for today, buried in garden soil up to their first or second set of leaves (meaning, these are planted about six inches deep!), the strong tomatoes in the sun gladdened my heart. May the Lord give the increase. About four flats planted; about 34 to go.

I also planted out one of the two flats of strawflower flowers. Those, too, would die in a frost. Thus, I have one flat in reserve.

Phil spent some time today plowing, then tilling the next section of garden bed for me. When he was done, I planted about 20 pounds of Yukon Gold seed potatoes, my favorite type of grocery store potato, so rich and buttery. Two years ago, I ate Bessette home grown potatoes, and there is no comparison with store-bought. So much more flavorful!

The flavor was the only consolation I had as, exhausted, I formed more beds, then used my hoedad to form trenches, and dropped in the cut up seed potatoes. My rows are, again, wavy and irregular. Perhaps if I were an engineer, they would be perfectly spaced. I think of this as potato planting for English majors.

I had made the mistake of looking for a short tutorial on how to cut up seed potatoes, and came across a large-scale commercial operation, with a massive cutting machine, fed by huge conveyor belts, loaded with tractor buckets taking potatoes out of semis. Compared with my process of setting potatoes in row, about one shoe-length apart, then covering by hand and foot, it seemed a bit silly to bother to grow such a staple.

It made the 20 pounds of potatoes I cut by hand seem futile. But for the promise of better flavor. . . .

We received delivery of nine enormous hay bales.

I realized recently that planting has consumed so much of my time, I have often forgotten the little oddities that happen around the farm.

For example, for eighteen months, our humanure buckets have served us well, without smell or filth. Yesterday evening, though, our house started to smell like a zoo. When I got up this morning, I noticed a yellow puddle on the floor. The bucket bottom had sprung a leak. This was not a pleasant way to start the day, but a few cents of tea tree oil and water to disinfect and cleanse the room, and a few minutes of time to clean it: that's the plumbing price of our system. I can afford that.

Completely different topic: we had twenty eggs on Tuesday; six eggs on Wednesday; five eggs on Thursday. And since Phil and I, combined, eat a dozen eggs for breakfast, clearly five per day is not sustainable. We guessed that the little chicks had, perhaps, developed an insatiable appetite for hen eggs. What else could cause such a reduction in production?

Phil and I checked eggs three times during the day today, and found sixteen eggs. And many little chicks clustered in the hen house. Interesting.

The ducklings have no proven to be terribly robust. We've had five die, all inexplicably, often in the middle of the day, when the cooler overnight weather has turned to weather in the mid-70s. It's disappointing.

Perhaps the most interesting moment, though, came as I headed to bed last night. Joe had fallen asleep in my bed with his hands clasped around Isaiah's arm. I'm not really sure why Isaiah fell asleep in my bed, but he is heavy enough now that I can't lift him easily, especially when he's a dead weight and all my energy is dissipated at the end of the day. So I lay down next to Joe.

The boys have eaten through almost 30 pounds of raisins in the last few weeks, and no matter how often we exhort them not to eat on our bed, somehow raisins drop onto the mattress every day. In the half light, I thought I saw a raisin on my bed, and lay down, only to feel a sting. The "raisin" was actually a dead wasp, fallen from the window above, and waiting for my arm.

I've never been stung when getting into bed before.

Skink or Salamander

Phil had put the sheep in a little section of weeds last night as dark fell. When we got up this morning, the sheep had cleaned up, so we put them back into their pen. They bawled all day, wishing for more greens.

While Phil had work for pay indoors, I planted another 150 raspberries. My line is not straight, but wavy. I like it.

One of my favorite things on the farm is the wildlife around here. We found another of the common orange-striped somethings (skinks? salamanders?). Isaiah played with it for a bit, then we put it back.

The boys have been biking all day. I did hear them all at play. Joe picked up a white tree-protector, and said, "I black knight. I must fight." After which, he attacked my shovel and knocked it down. "It dead."