Farming and Orchard – Page 12

2015 Sunken Corn Hugel results

The majority of the corn has been harvested and it is……interesting, to say the least. I planted painted mountain corn and yellow sweet corn in mounds in the sunken hugel. The mounds were surrounded by green beans which grew like crazy. They’ve all been harvested already. The corn is different. The color variety in the painted mountain corn is pretty extreme as you can tell in the above picture. More interesting is the intermixing between the two corn varieties I planted.

These SHOULD have been yellow sweet corn. The yellow sweet corn is odd in oh so many ways. For one, the kerneling is crazy bad.

And secondly because some of it was colored. Just weird.

The painted mountain corn didn’t avoid the weird kerneling but it is a lot more uniform.

I’ve decided to dry all of the corn for seed next year. I’m impressed with it’s hardiness as corn is notoriously hard to grow here (thanks wind). It will make a beautiful display hanging from the pot rack!

Straw as mulch in the garden

This years garden has been a pretty good success. Some failures but mostly awesome success. So I want to expand. I want more, always more. Our soil is a problem and so are weeds. The soil I imported for this years garden was infested with lambs quarter. That has been a real challenge. I have used straw in the raised bed with good success so I wanted to do it all with straw this fall and plant into it this spring a la Ruth Stout.

The problem for me is finding straw. The straw I bought for my straw bale garden may have possibly been sprayed with something, leading to it’s failure. I didn’t want hay because of the seeds, of course. I thought I wanted wheat straw. As an organic wheat selling mega house state I knew I could find that. In fact it’s stacked up in front of our house some years. Wouldn’t it figure that the only seller I could find was in Colorado then. What a trial.

We decided we’d drive down and grab a bunch of straw for our driveway (that will be another post) and my expanded garden areas. I wasn’t looking forward to the drive. It’d be about an hour round trip which isn’t too bad if you don’t have to take 2 toddlers with you. So, about a mile from our house has been sitting an estimated 8 large round bales of straw. They have exploded everywhere and been abandoned for a little over 2 weeks. They obviously fell off of someones truck and they decided it wasn’t worth it to pick them up. Luckily, it’s worth it to me. I grabbed the kids this Saturday, put all our rubber boots and work gloves on (yes my children have adorable tiny work gloves) and a tarp and set off in our SUV.

I did 6 loads on Saturday (2 without the kids) and 3 loads today. I have accumulated a nice stack of straw in one of my garden areas. TONS more to pick up still. It’s almost free (I’m counting gas as a cost) and it’s AMAZING. It’s chock full of bugs at this point which thrills my birds. It amuses the kids to grab a few loads and I couldn’t be more pleased with someone else’s misfortune. Now to finish grabbing what I need and spread it around evenly.

Fall planting plans

Last week was unseasonably cold. I was becoming concerned we were going to have a freeze before my garden was done. Thankfully we did not. It did have us thinking about our fall planting plans though. So much to do before winter and I keep adding seeds to the mix. Here is a short list of what we are going to plant:

Egyptian Walking Onions

I purchased the bulbs off of Etsy and I’m hoping the reviews were correct and they work wonders for me. We have issues growing onion and I’m not quite sure why. They never get particularly large, if they grow at all. I’m hoping this variety changes that!

Garlic

These little bulbs are the result of letting your garlic scrapes grow and go to seed. Purchased from the same Etsy seller as the onions I realize I’ll be waiting 2 years to get the benefit of this planting. Still, the quantity is enough that when I get a harvest it will be huge.

Winter Barley

https://greencoverseed.com/species/1054

We bought an acres worth of winter barley. It is an experiment for us. I am hoping to get some for eating, some for animal forage and my husband wants some for beer.

Nitro Radish

https://greencoverseed.com/species/1060

I bought nitro radish as an experiment in loosening our farm compacted land. I’m interested to see what it does for our soil quality and if it distracts the ground animals from my trees, all the better.

Dryland pasture seed

I bought this seed last year and threw out 2 acres this spring. I still have 2 acres of seed sitting in my garage. I’m going to spread it around the parts of our land that are not growing much of anything. I’m interested to see how successful winter sowing pasture is here.

Alfalfa

Alfalfa is another seed I bought quite a few acres of an simply didn’t plant all of in this spring. I’m going to be seeding it in areas I think can use the nitrogen (like our tree line) and areas that simply need something more than dirt growing. So that is all we have going on for winter sowing. We have about acres worth of seed. Should be an interesting experiment

Country life

Pumpkin — This pumpkin has been eaten by the turkeys since this picture was taken.

Kitchen garden is having it’s ups and downs. I have a squash bug infestation. This is made a bit better by the spider that has taken up residence at the bottom of the squash. The squash that have managed to grow are getting eaten by the birds. Turkeys I think. I’m going to have to make that fence a priority.

The wine bottle hot box looks good. Things are really growing now. Flowers have bloomed and we are excited!

Corn is growing well as well as the tomatoes, peppers and green beans. Green beans have been harvested twice already and are still growing strong.

We took a nice walk last night. Son was excited to wear his boots and walk in the puddles from the rain the day before. Daughter rode in the backpack. That thing is a life saver.

We have purchased a new macro lens and I’m having a heck of a time figuring it out. Tried to take a nice picture of one of our many sunflowers and this is the best I could get. Ugh!

Vetch pod

I have a few random plants growing around the property. Wind blown seed, never watered. I’m impressed with the fact that this has grown at all.

Removing Canadian Thistle the fun way

I’ve been slack with several parts of the property lately and you can tell. The flowers beside the house have been completely taken over by canadian thistle. Oh my. A thorny, pain filled mess of a fast spreading nightmare. What was a girl to do?

The thistle had set seed and the seed heads were beginning to open. So the obvious solution, to me, was to collect the seed heads and burn them. That’s what I did!

So we started burning the seed heads on our S’mores making plate. The wind was a a bit too severe to keep flaming pieces of plant material there though, so we moved them to a bucket and had some fun!

While we didn’t use the seeds for a s’mores roast I thought I’d include pics of how we make s’mores in Wyoming Winds. Yum!

Why I don’t trellis my tomatoes

I see many tips and designs for tomato trellises out there. Some quite fancy, some nothing but string. I am not using any of them. My tomatoes are doing just fine growing wild and free.

WHY I don’t trellis can be credited back to Joseph Lofthouse on permies.com. He is a pioneer in landrace gardening. You can find him here. A few of the quotes that had an impact on me are:

Some people say that landraces arise only by natural means. My response is that landraces are always domesticated, and domestication only happens because farmers select among this year’s crop for the traits that they hope will show up in next year’s crop.

I noticed that plants from my saved seed grew differently… Because my vines tended to arch upwards to keep the tomatoes out of the dirt… Since I don’t stake tomatoes I only save seeds from tomatoes that are not touching the dirt and rotting. So I had inadvertently been selecting for genes that keep the tomatoes suspended in the air without staking.

Now, I’m a lazy farmer. I have a lot going on in my life. Lots to do. So trellising takes valuable time, energy and money. I don’t have any of those resources to spare for something like that. So I planted them and guess what, they’re doing what Joseph’s have done. They are supporting themselves, growing up, vining without support. It is AMAZING to see my tomato bushes. I love how easy it has been. I water every once in awhile but otherwise I’ve done nothing to my tomatoes. I believe we are going to have a bumper harvest this year and I’m a excited to get to eating/freezing and drying these wonderful tomatoes.

I will be saving my own seeds, of course.

Tomato plant in planter box.

Tomato plant in tire of kids sandbox. Lower stems are supporting this main stem in growing fairly upright.

My tomatoes sure are busy this year!