Working the farm

It was a very busy weekend here on the farm.

Right now, I have three gardens growing.  With the almost complete lack of rain this summer, keeping the gardens watered has been incredibly difficult.  Because of this, my cousin Mike and I jerry-rigged a waterer and tried it out.  We hooked up a small electric pump and pump water out of the creek into a tank, then pump the water out of the tank and onto the gardens.  It takes forever to fill up that 275 gallon tank so I have my eye out for a stronger pump.

The garden is producing green beans, tomatoes, Hungarian and jalapeno peppers, zuccini, yellow and white squash and cucumbers.  A lot of the tomatoes have the blight.  The watermelons and cantelopes seem to be coming along fine despite the dry weather.  However, the carrots and corn aren't fairing as well.

Mike and I spent a good portion of the morning weeding and tieing up tomatoes. After picking hot peppers, we went inside and made a ton of hot dogs and hot peppers.  In the end, we had 13 quarts canned. Not too bad for one day's work!

As far as our experimental commercial type garden which is about an acre or so, after the very little rain we got the hundreds of seeds we planted have started to come up.  This includes watermelons, cucumbers, squash, three types of pumpkins, gourds, cantelopes and sweet corn. Even though the corn is finally growing, the deer are eating it as fast as it comes up.  I don't expect that any will survive until harvest to be sold.  My goal was to prove that I could plant a successful, large-scale garden for commercial sale.  I've definitely proven that I'm capable but need to figure out how to tackle the deer problem and have a more efficient water plan for next year.

Sunday morning and once again we were hauling water from the creek and pumping it on the gardens.  Added Miracle Grow to the two smaller, personal-use gardens.The rest of the day I worked on clearing brush along the one side of my driveway.  I have a long driveway that is about a third of a mile long.  One side is an old fence row that is overgrown with briars, locust, tulip popular, vines and such. I'm tired of driving off to one side to avoid all the limbs.  The big snows we had this past winter laid those limbs across the driveway and made it twice as hard to plow the snow and with them up against the drive made it hard to have room to plow. So far I have hauled five trailer loads of brush and am only a quarter of the way done. But, wow, what a difference! In some places, I have gained four or five extra feet of width for the driveway so need to keep plugging along on it till it is done.

There's always something to do.