Garden Update! (Mid-August 2019)

Weeds, weeds, and more weeds, my kingdom for a weed wacker!

But seriously, from a very rainy start, we’ve moved on to the sultry days of late June/early August. I’ve had a pretty busy week what with the birthday party and the actual birthday family dinner and swim lessons, coordinating chicken pick-ups and egg drop-offs, and being pregnant - pretty par for the course around here really. I’ve also recently been offered a part-time off-homestead job working with English Language Learner (ELL) students, so I’m preparing and excited about that as well.

While I’ve been occupied with all of that, my papi has been mowing and weed wacking like a maniac, and my mom has been super busy tending the garden. She is a gardening goddess really, so I thought I’d treat you all to a short, end-of-week post with garden update photos. Hope you enjoy!

Sometimes the dill plants itself - this blossom that was bright
yellow in June is now brown and depositing dill seeds
each time it is bumped or shaken

The tomato and pepper plants are
finally beginning to produce!

Jalapeños - mom weeded this bed, but the
weeds are encroaching from the paths

Some beds are still covered in plastic
to "control the weeds"
It's safe to say the plastic has had only
limited success longterm

Broccoli (and weeds)

More broccoli (and more weeds!)

Beautifully weeded tomato bed,
compliments of mom
The hover flies are being truly obnoxious
around this bed today

Beets - also weeded by mom
(are you sensing a theme???)

Cabbage bed and two beds covered with scraps of
landscaping cloth (seems to work better than the regular
plastic)
AKA I weeded a bed, it's a miracle!!!

Everbearing Strawberries -
the plants where I weeded are producing well,
but I need to weed the rest of the bed for
a third time

Green tomatoes are coming on - can't
wait to make some tomato sauce

I used some of the landscaping cloth to
kill grass and make a path to the far end
of the garden

A Day in June

SO on with the show. I had hoped to post this on June 14, but a once a week habit will have to do for now. Life being what life is – complicated!

In June I took some photos during a typically busy day here on Shepherd’s Flock Farm. We were in the midst of harvesting Music garlic, playing (I have two sons), and making hay. My oldest son noticed ripe wild Black Raspberries on the bushes, so I had to transition to harvesting the berries despite having laid other plans. We call that “Farm Time” around here. Sometimes a happy occurrence like ripe berries shifts your focus for a time. Sometimes a storm knocks a tree down across the road or a neighbor’s driveway, and that has to be dealt with before moving on to other projects. To live in close communion with nature means you will be kept on your toes with regularity.

Garden (west) - the rain has made for
healthy weeds in the garden this year

Garden (east) - regular weeding of beds
to rescue overwhelmed desireable plants helps

Garlic Harvest - I use a spadefork to loosen the
Music Garlic and then gently pull up each bulb for drying

Garlic Harvest - I borrowed Mom's cart to
haul garlic up for bundling/hanging out to dry

My boys have a garden bed dedicated to play

Occasionally they find tiny friends in the garden.
We examine them and then let them go.

Making hay - the activity for the afternoon

Making hay - Papi used a square baler to make hay on our
south field. Some of our friends and neighbors came over
to help out.

Some long, hot, sunny days have sweet endings.
While everyone else went to the barn to unload the hay bales,
I stayed and harvested wild Black Raspberries from
the perimeter of the field. Delicious!!!

Shepherd’s Flock Farm Garden – Before and After

Part 1: Creating raised beds and planting

Kate Payne de Chavez

If you look back through the blog posts, you can see some photographs of work we did along the lake in early spring before we could really get out into the garden.   It was too cold and the ground was too tough for us to get out and plant our veggies, so we satisfied ourselves with cleaning up the winter’s debris and waiting for the daffodils to bloom.   It was our way of getting out of the house and back to the farm.  

We have quite a bit of work to do to get this place back to the level of early successes that Mama and Papi had a few years ago, so we’re working together as a team to draw up a plan.

In late April and early May the ground was finally soft and dry enough to work, so Jhan and I talked with Mama and Papi about what they wanted in terms of garden beds.   We decided on beds that were approximately 4’ x 10’ and 4’ x 12’ (with a few oddly shaped beds here and there; the garden isn't exactly rectangular due to a little stream bed/drainage ditch along one side).   The walkways are generally 3’ or 4’ wide to allow for a wheel barrow to make the journey from the beds to the gate and all the way down to the compost bin.   Jhan and I laid out a grid using butcher’s twine and garden flags, and Jhan and Papi went to work creating the permanent raised beds.   I emphasize the word permanent here, because my poor mother and father have laid out and created theoretically permanent raised beds several times in the past.   Life has a way of running off with our well-made plans, and weeds invade.   That is perhaps a story for another post.   In any event, here you can see the grid lines and Jhan working away on digging out walkways and piling the soil onto the raised beds  (Mama, aka Avis, aka Nana, is in the background tidying up the asparagus bed).

Once the beds were ready, we were more than ready to plant.   We planted lettuces, peas, and beans from seed.   We then went to Skipper’s Greenhouse (here in Carroll County at 2044 Canyon Rd SW) and bought a TON of plants: tomatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, basil, dill, thyme, peppers, and marigolds.   The raised beds are mulched with pine needles from the pine woods on the farm, and as much of the walkways as possible are mulched with wood chips from a local tree-trimming business.   Waste not, want not.         

Around May 25th we had a very late frost, so in these images you can see tarpaulins, crates, bits of pipe, and other random materials that Papi and Jhan used to quickly cover the plants when the frost warning was announced.    Of our 48 tomato plants, I believe we lost only about 6.   We were blessed to lose so few; many of the folks around us (including commercial farmers) had a significant amount of crop damage.   

Stay tuned for Part 2 to see some After pics with the current state of the garden.  

Take care, and God bless!