Progress!

This weekend we had great progress. Things are coming together nicely. The seedlings look great, the beds look great, the gophers love us.... as in they sure do love it that we are growing food for them. Too bad they don't have any money to give us. And unfortunately for them, they are in constant peril with all the traps that have been set. They are tricky though and somehow manage to steer clear of our traps at times, while some are just not so lucky. It's an awful part of the farm life and we don't like it, but their natural predators (coyotes, foxes, apparently weasels, and who knows what else) have been kept out of the system by our fencing and so we now are the top predators in the system and must keep them to limited numbers lest we be over run by money toting and grubbing gophers and moles.

But alas, why start a blog post telling of the gopher trapping? I'm sure you'd much rather find out what we have been up to since the last post...

well, first a couple of images I forgot to post with the last one. These are just two images of what the blocks looked like on May 29th

foreground to background: tomatoes, peppers, melons, cucumbers, summer squash, beans, beans, and more beans, and some various greens

the keyhole block with potatoes around the outside and herbs, sunflowers, and some beans in the center

For the next 2 weeks we prepared more of the keyhole block. On the 29th it was still grassy in the front area, so that needed to be scraped, allowed to dry down, and then started to sift some compost for the bed. By June 10th the area looked like this:

 I decided that the keyhole block was going to be more free flowing with it's design. I wanted it to have a design that allowed for fun and interest. I built these bean trellis' using redwood branches found along the edge of the property. In the end, I chose branches that had an arching form and a strong upright. They sort of lent itself to this design I call the "spiderweb sail" trellis. Call it whatever you want, but the idea was that when you enter into the center bullseye of the keyhole, my hope is that the beans (Grandma Nellie's Yellow Mushroom pole bean that is!) will grow and entangle and fill the spaces of the trellis and you would therefore walk through a sort of arbor/wall of bean plant. We'll see if that actually happens!

entering the bullseye through the spiderweb sail trellis

We also started working on our irrigation. At first in May, we had bought dripper irrigation that had emitters installed inside. This ended up being a problem because for one thing, the emitters were about a foot apart which was too far for most of what we were planting, and for another, it's more expensive and time consuming to set up. By early June we decided to change some of the irrigation we already set in place by changing it to T-tape drip line. This is pretty easy to use, less expensive, can be shaped to oddly formed beds (like our keyhole block as you will see later) and has slits in it to allow for water to drip every 6 inches or so. So we are using the emitter installed drip for some things that are further spaced apart like our squashes (after all, we already spent the money). The T-tape is best for pretty much everything else and especially things that are sown closer together.

Here's a photo montage of some irrigation and all the plants that I'm sure everyone wants to see!

June 10th

 

and last but not least for June 10th it was blazing hot, so hot that this is us 

working hard on the farm despite the heat:

June 17th

The first peppers! These are Padron peppers. We quickly fried them up with a bit of coconut oil and ate them with delicious meal of rice and beans and slaw. These were not hot. Supposedly 1 in every few will be hot.

A first tomato.

June 25th

These photos document the completion of our keyhole block with planting of 3 kinds of beets interspersed with carrots. The root veggies need a very fine seed bed so I added 3 wheelbarrows of finely sifted compost and dug and raked and declumped and reraked quite a bit in order to get it as fine as possible. I'd probably have to be there for days before it was super fine, but I hope it's good enough for finicky carrots. I also planted different kinds of greens between the funky potato contraptions; 2 varieties of chicory; escarole and endive as well as red giant mustard and arugula.

 And to round out this post, more photo montage of how we are making Progress...