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Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Double the farming, double the fun

I went to The Farm both days this weekend. On Day 1, I did little besides a quick survey and some harvesting. First, the survey. The cucumbers are climbing the vine (my goal is to can some sweet gherkins, not harvest cukes):


Farmer Tom put in a third bean crop in the old spinach bed, and they are popping up:


The second bean crop in the next bed continues to do well:


Yeah, it looks like dirt, but these two beds will, we hope, be giving us celery and broccoli in the fall:


Next to the tomatoes, we have a massive volunteer plant of a type we have never planted. At first, it looked like a zuke plant, but then it exploded, creeping everywhere:


It must like acidic soil, because Jeb the Wonder Dog and his buddy Willie both pee there all the time. As it turns out, it is some kind of melon plant, maybe watermelon, and probably is a result of seed-spitting by Farmer Tom's daughter while eating melons:


Having checked to ensure that all is well on The Farm, we did some harvesting. Farmer Tom harvested these squash and zukes before I got there:


Our first non-cherry tomatoes are ripening on the deck railing:


We returned to the squash bed, got a few more squash and a zuke there, went out and thinned the carrots some more (the carrot crop is going to be excellent -- we're getting cooking-size carrots from thinning) and harvested a butt-load of beans and some more banana peppers:


On Sunday, I returned to tackle the task I had shied away from the day before -- the onion bed:


It was seriously overrun with weeds. The onions were hanging in there, but weeding was called for. Did I mention it was about 400 degrees? Yeah, I was soaked when it was over, but the onion bed was well-weeded:


Probably lost 5 pounds. Fortunately, I replaced it with roughly 5 pounds of beer. And we got a few onions out of it:


Over the next few weeks, there is going to be major harvesting going on. The tomatoes are going to bust, the first bean crop has one more good harvest left in it, and the peppers are really digging on the hot, dry weather we've had recently (following weeks of frequent thunderstorms). All of this means a lot of baking, canning and various other food preservation methods. Gonna get busy.

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