Amber Waves of Grain

This is why I love living here (even if it is raining AGAIN). Isn't it beautiful?


And yes, I know that it's not amber. It's not actually grain, either -- just grass. But the grain around here is still too short to wave so dramatically. And it won't be amber until fall. Don't harsh my buzz.

Minor Setback

We dug out the garden with a backhoe.

We've known since winter that we had some drainage issues (see: Sea of Mud) that sooner or later we would have to deal with, and we also had some giant piles of beautiful topsoil that we wanted to spread around. One of the piles was where we put the garden -- we thought that we would wait until next year to do the excavating.

But the drainage issues turned out to be a bigger deal than we thought they would. Add to that the limited time we've had for upkeep, the smothering of our property with weeds, and the cherry on top -- the terrible weather we've had. Seriously, it's been Biblical. We had to fire up the woodstove two nights ago. It's the MIDDLE OF JUNE!

So, reluctantly, we called the excavator. We could have had them move everything but the pile the garden was in, but that would have meant calling them back next year, which would mean extra money, which would have made A very sad.

So we had a pea shoot, tiny green onion and broccoli-green stir fry (it was actually very good), and several salads of spinach, beet greens and teeny tiny lettuce. We had the excavator make us an actual garden location, so we'll put the peppers and eggplants and peanuts there (they are all STILL languishing on the ledge), get some tomato starts from the farmers market, maybe toss in some beans and zucchini, and accept that we really are the idiots that we thought we were when we started.

It's not a total loss -- we still have strawberries (although we won't if I don't get some bird netting on them), parsley, rhubarb, fruit trees (those sticks are looking positively lush) and chickens who might start laying any day now. We are learning many many things about soil management, weed control, topography and drainage, albeit the hard way. Today is a gorgeous day; the sun is shining, the birds are singing and a breeze (not gale-force winds) is blowing. We abide.

Can't you just TASTE it?

Here is our orchard. Hint: it's easier to see the holes than the trees.

Two plums, two apples, two cherries. Probably no fruit for 3-4 years, presuming the deer that I suddenly see everywhere don't strip off the leaves and kill them.

It's been a bad couple of weeks on the farm. I set out the cabbage and lettuce on May 11 -- the lettuce died; the cabbage is sort of lingering on but it doesn't look good.

We set out the tomatoes (the ones I didn't accidentally snap off getting out of the pots) on May 17. It got down to 37 degrees on May 20, and 34 on the 21. Even the finest milk jug cloches can't protect tomatoes against that. The tomatoes are probably all dead, all 40 of them.

This is definitely as bad as we've done gardening in years. There's still a lot coming up: peas, spinach, beets, radishes. The strawberries are fine, the rhubarb is alive, and perhaps as many as 3 parsleys made it. The peppers and eggplants and still thriving on the ledge, waiting for better days. But all the failure has been pretty depressing. I can't help but think how screwed we'd be if we actually were relying on this to feed our family.

Still. The trees are alive; the chickens are thriving. We should be harvesting strawberries and radishes soon. We learn from our abject failure. Next year we'll do better.

Life gets in the way...

Sorry for the lack of updates -- it turns out having a baby and a couple jobs and a brand-new house and four chickens and plants is really hard. We're in kind of a busy patch in real life for the moment, and Baby seems to be so highly evolved she doesn't need to sleep, so opportunities to update are few and far between lately. Hopefully in a week or so (presuming Baby ever goes to bed for more than 20 minutes at a time) things will be calmer. I know what the weed is (hint: it's one of these) and I have a picture of the "orchard"!

Neighbors

Harrowing, I think. I should change the blog name to "things I don't know anything about."

We live kind of out in BFE, but that doesn't mean we don't have neighbors. A's family goes back on this land for generations, but we're the only ones who actually live out here now. There's about 700 acres around us that belong to his family but are rented to another farmer, and several hundred more acres to our south that belong to another family -- but we only see those folks a few times a year when they're actually working the land, like yesterday when I took this picture across the road.

It's sort of surreal to me to actually see people farming, especially this sort of large-scale monoculture. For the last few weeks enormous farm machinery has been driving past our house. I mean really massive, as big as a house. Although "farming methods, machinery, etc. used in the Idaho Palouse" is yet another thing to add to the list of stuff I need to learn about, even knowing nothing it's fascinating to see the different fields around here greening up at different rates. There are some with wheat already ankle high, looking like incredibly lush grass. And others, like across the road, just plowing/harrowing now.

Sea of Mud II: The Weedening

Have you seen this weed?



Because we sure as heck have; it's every-freaking-where. As the sea of mud begins to dry, these things are popping up anywhere there's bare dirt. It vastly, vastly outnumbers any other weed out there.

And there's another thing we're idiots about -- weeds. I know dandelions, tansy ragwort, crabgrass and pigweed by name. There are a few others I know by sight: the groundcovery one with the purple flowers and pods that shoot seeds; the feathery one that looks sort of like carrots; the various ones that look sort of like dandelions but aren't. And the thing is, the common weeds are so common, you hate to even ask anyone about them -- you sound like a moron. But you have to know your weeds in order to fight them, especially if you're anti-Roundup. For the moment we're pulling up as many as we can, and trying to figure out some kind of cheap cover crop we can plant that might smother them out.

So, if anybody knows what this thing is and maybe a magical trick to kill it without poison or, you know, effort, please let me know.

Who knew weather was such a big freakin' deal?

I used to think talking about the weather was the last resort of people who couldn't think of anything else to talk about. That was before I decided to be a farmer.

You know, in spite of everything, I like to think we didn't just move out here with absolutely no idea what we were doing. I took an 8-week class on small acreage farming, we've read tons of books, we've done a reasonable amount of backyard vegetable gardening, we've talked to growers at the farmers market. But I've been finding that the resources I've found speak most to our experience this spring are some books I read when I was about 10: the Little House on the Prairie books. Specifically, their focus on, and evocative descriptions of, the vagaries of weather.

Dust Storm, May 3.

Snow, May 6.

Not pictured: 80 (!) mph wind gusts, hail, rain of frogs.

What I mean to say is, weather. It's crazy! And has kept us cooped up inside since about April 28. As best we can tell, most of our crops are okay -- I tried to hat some parsley starts in the middle of a downpour and they mostly blew away, so we lost 6 or 7 of eight parsley plants. And we haven't planted a thing since April 26. The weather report for the next 10 days looks good though, so -- just like Pa Ingalls -- we're going to make hay while the sun shines.