Pickles!

To say we have a few cucumbers is an understatement. We have a lot of cucumbers and we need to find something to do to preserve them... pronto.

Dan's parent came up a few weeks ago with all of his Mom's old canning supplies in tow. It's time to crack the boxes open to see what we have. Large pot? Check. Rack to immerse jars in pot? Check. Jars, lids and rings? Check. It's time to make us some pickles.

We thought it would be fun to have a pickling date night. We'd get our cukes ready to go together and put the pot on a hot fire on the fire pit. Seemed like a good plan. Although we had fun, our fire pit proved not to be hot enough to to keep the water boiling. The pickles are tasty, but not very crunchy. Oh well, you live and you learn. Dan has another idea... but that's for another post.

Freeze! You're surrounded!

By a fence, that is.

As Dan said, we started sinking fence posts and we have the ENTIRE garden surrounded by 7-foot high deer fencing. Granted, we haven't had a problem with deer, but since we were taking the time to put up a fence, we decided we might as well protect it from as many creatures as possible.

As you'll see in the pictures, we didn't use store bought fence posts. We used small cedar trees from the property. Dan, a true Yankee, is always looking for a way to use things we already have.

After we had two sides of the fence up, Dan saw a small bunny in the garden and went about his usual tactics to shoo it out. Deer fencing, if you've never seen it, is practically invisible. The bunny proceeded to run straight into the fence, bounce back and sit on it's behind shaking it's head wondering what just happened. It made another go at it, but to no avail. It finally figured out to root at the bottom of the fence to make it's way out. We've since staked the bottom so no bunnies will make it in or out.

Humans = 1 point
Bunnies = zero

Good fences make good corn.

It seems that every time I told somebody new about my plans for a garden one of their first questions was always “Are you going to put up a fence?” Then they would go on to explain how the deer would devastate our garden if we didn’t. My response was always that I would wait and see, as there had been very few deer sightings on our property.

Fast forward several months. The garden had been doing great, with nary a nibble from any critters, deer or otherwise (some insect issues, but that’s a different post). Our peas came and went; the tomatoes and cucumbers started producing like crazy, and still no bothersome animals. We also survived several heavy rain/windstorms that literally leveled every corn stalk in the garden. After each storm we stood each stalk up and hilled around the bases; very time-consuming, but the thought of that fresh, delicious, super-sweet corn made it worthwhile. In time the corn started putting on ears and it looked like we would have a bumper crop.
Then one morning I went out to the garden as usual and found one of our almost-ready-for-picking ears of corn lying on the ground, half eaten. The stalk it had been attached to was still upright, none the worse for wear. I was puzzled, but didn’t find any evidence pointing to the culprit. The next day, there were three half eaten ears; the next day, about eight more. Now I was beginning to be upset. On day four when I went out, there was even more damage, and right in the middle of it were two fluffy brown bunny rabbits chewing on ears of corn. As I stood there speechless, one of the rabbits calmly reached up to the nearest corn stalk and nipped off yet another ear of corn. Apparently the quarter eaten one at his feet was no longer satisfying.
That was the last straw, so I grabbed a handful of stones, and yelling some garbled, angry nonsense, began hurling stones at the marauding bunnies. Incredibly, they didn’t stop eating, even as I began moving toward them, still shouting and throwing stones. Finally a rock whizzed close enough to one of them that they decided it would be beneficial to them if they moved on. They darted away from me and scrambled through the fence that separates our property from the land next door.

It was on.

Here the dilemma though: I have to sleep at night, and I work a full time job 30 miles away from home, leaving me precious little time to stake out my corn patch waiting for thieving bunnies. In addition, we have neighbors living fairly close on one side so shooting bunnies with any type of firearm was out of the question. This meant that every morning when I went out there was more and more devastation, leaving fewer and fewer ears of corn that might mature enough to be harvested by the humans that planted them.

Last weekend my parents drove the 6 hours from their home to ours for a long weekend visit. My fervent wish was that we would at least have enough mature corn to cook for one meal while they were here. So, Sunday afternoon, my mother and I went to the garden to take a look. The scene was heartbreaking. After taking a quick inventory, I decided to pick every single remaining ear of corn, in the hopes that some would be mature enough to eat. Out of 450 linear feet of corn stalks we harvested 2 dozen ears. Of that 2 dozen maybe 10 were mature, with the rest somewhere between “throw it away” to “you might get a mouthful of corn off that one”. So, we cooked up what we had, and it was delicious.

This week I’ve started sinking fence posts.

Our first carrots!

Cute little guys aren't they? The little one on the left looks like it could get up and walk away. It turns out carrots need very moist and very loose, loamy soil. Unfortunately, this patch didn't get tilled nearly as deeply as it should have, and we also neglected to run a soaker hose down this row. So in other words, even though we're going to get a boat-load of carrots this year, they'll mostly be stumpy and woody like these two. Oh well, one more item for our live and learn list for next year!

Serves you right!

Remember the lovely hornworms I told you about? I did some more research on them and found out that a type of wasp exists only to lay it's eggs in hornworms. Ecosystems are a funny world. I showed Dan a picture of what an 'infected' hormworm looks like in case he ever sees one. Well... sure enough... we have a hornworm sitting on one of our tomato plants with wasp cocoons just waiting to hatch. Serves him right for noshing on our tomatoes, if you ask me! Anyhoo, the research advised that if not infected, you need to get the worm off pronto, otherwise you provide an all day smorgasbord. However, if it IS infected to leave it alone. What?? Leave it alone? The website proceeded to say that the worm will be immobilized (therefore not doing any more damage to your plant) and you want the wasps to hatch, grow up and go lay eggs in another hornworm, immobilize it, and so on. Hmm... this is a good thing. Interesting. Now we watch for the cocoons to hatch. They haven't as of this morning. We'll keep watching!

Cukes, cukes and more cukes!

Some things in the garden aren't doing as well as we'd hoped. Some are doing ok. Others are doing great! Cucumbers are in the 'great' category. We have no shortage of cukes this year! However, you can only make so many dinner salads and tomato & cucumber salad before you have to start looking for new recipes. That's when pickles popped into Dan's head. He went online and found a couple of recipes. We spent Friday night, our 'date night', making pickles. We had a blast! Turns out it they are beyond easy to make and delicious - better than any pickle you'd find in a store. I can't wait for more cukes to make more pickles!

Does the farm wait?

Today I am finally confident I'm getting a cold. I don't get colds very often, but when I do, they are usually 'doozies'. It's rainy and blah today, so I don't particularly have much to do outside. All of the plants were watered by mother nature. Everything that 'had' to be picked was early this morning.

However, my progressing cold has me thinking - a farm can't wait. It can't wait to be watered, harvested, chickens fed and eggs collected. Nor will it wait for an extended vacation. Or a short vacation for that matter. Once we have sheep or goats, they can't wait to be milked and fed and watered. Fences won't wait to be repaired. The larger the farm gets, the more that won't be able to wait.

Sigh. This doesn't particularly sound fun or relaxing to me. Part of the reason we moved back to the country is because we wanted a slower pace of life. A simpler life. Room to breath. We will be able to breath acreage-wise, but what about workload-wise? I'm not so sure. There's no conclusion to this post - just a thought being typed out. I suppose I will just have to either 'wait it out and see' or adapt. I foresee adapting in my future.