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Erin and Joe showed up Wednesday. The first thing we did was stick three different types of of hoes in the vise and use the electric hand-held grinder to to sharpen them.
In the ideal world, we would of sat in home-made wooden chairs sharpening our hoes with hand files while drinking fair trade coffee and green tea listening to “Sugar Magnolia”
No time for that, I put the grinder to the metal and let the sparks fly.
First job was hand-hoeing sweet potatoes. I had cultivated them with the tractor on Friday but they needed some hand hoeing.
Then we moved to the okra that the pigweed had grown higher than to hoe and hand weed. I had cultivated the okra the Friday before just guessing where the rows were.
After 2 years of drought, we are having to learn all again that weeds grow much faster than crops and deal with them accordingly.
Limited Tractor Access
I use my dad’s 55 hp tractor for tillage work but he uses it for hay work and to run augers into his bins.
He told me I could use the tractor for a few days because he was going to be harvesting wheat and carrying directly to the buying station.
But the buying station for wheat is filling up and there is a 3-5 hour wait to unload, grain trucks backed up past the railroad tracks.
I show up at my Dad’s looking to borrow the portable hammermill to grind some chicken feed. He already had it hooked up to his 4430 John Deere tractor to move the last 60 bushels of oats from last year to this year’s bin of oats.
He let me go ahead and grind my chicken feed but then I got to help clean out a bin of oats and move augers around.
Frankly, I love that kind of work. Cleaning out a grain bin is soothing. Moving grain augers around hooked to the front end loader of a tractor is a complex skill, and could kill you, but the slower you go, the better it works out.
Tractor time
I got the tractor for a few hours, tilling like crazy and go to check on Erin and Joe. They have been hoeing and pulling weeds and I had put on the bale spear to carry large round bales of straw so they could mulch the okra.
They inform me that they feel like chain-gang convicts… So we break for Lunch.
I will be at Charlotte and Jenifer will not be at Matthews. Ellie got selected to play on her softball league’s all-star team from this area and the games begin Friday, hosted in Anson county, and go on Fri., Sat., Sun., and Mon.
We are very proud of Ellie but my opinion of youth ball is checked with a frequently bitten tongue. It is madness. Growing up playing Little League, there were few if any parents at the games, just boys playing baseball and having fun. Yeah, we wanted to win but it was understood when two team met, one would win and one would lose. No need to cry about it and you still had chores to do when you got home regardless if you won or lost.
Now there are parents and grandparents micro-managing their kids, what is supposed to be play time, as a focus of their existence.
We actually had to sign a form this year that we would not verbally harass coaches , players, or umpires during the course of a game. Apparently that has become a problem.
My point of view is that playing ball is not fair, school is not fair, the workplace is not fair, growing orgainc vegetables on a small scale and competing with the industrial food complex is not fair either.
My answer is to the above “problems” is quit whining, accept the challenge and change what you think needs changing. Just shut up about how unfair stuff is.
Limited eggs, tons of Lettuce, the last of Levi’s onions, garlic, and arugula and maybe some Zephyer squash.
I have not really did much of it since high school 30 years ago, but I have always had a hankering to.
I had a potato plow that came with my BCS walk behind tiller. it did not work that well with the tiller but I had the bright idea to weld it to the cultivator frame on my Tuff-Bilt cultivating tractor.
My tuff-bilt tractor does not look quite like that, mine is 30 years old.
Arc-welding is a blast, melting steel together while sweating like a pig…By the way, pigs don’t sweat, they do not have sweat glands, that is why they wallow in mud holes.
First thing that happened, the post office called and said our 65 baby turkeys had arrived. We we not expecting them until Friday since they were coming from TX. but glad to get them early.
We ordered 65 and they sent 67. That is normal to account for any death loss in transit, but they all arrived alive.
I spent a couple of hours getting the turkey set up in the brooder while everyone else was harvesting and washing around 500 heads of lettuce. The forecast for Friday is 97 with a heat index of 101-103 and our thoughts were that our lettuce would be better suited in the walk-in cooler than in the field.
We then started tying up tomato plants to their individual stakes. Labor-intensive… Erin and i were pulling off the suckers and Jen, Pam, Charles, and CJ were following being doing the actual tying.
It takes about 10 man hours to tie up our 600 tomato plants and it happens every week.
Then we moved to the garlic patch and started pulling up garlic.
Around 4 pm, everyone started to fade. Complaining about minor things like open, oozing blisters, heat stoke, and other such non-sense…
Jenifer and I have been humbled by the caliber of folks that have shown up this year to work along side us.
We love rain, we never complain about rain. But we would love to save some for later in the summer…
We finally got our tiller back together. I tilled and re-tilled and planted Friday, Saturday after market, and even on Sunday. I rarely work on Sunday, just cause it ain’t right. But I did anyway and also on Monday till dark..
Monday evening, I was beginning to wonder why I worked through the weekend and was still working close to dark Monday evening.
Then the lightening bugs started firing off everywhere. I had just finished planting 6 200+ feet rows of Limbercob heirloom corn that a a couple from Lincoln Co. had shared with me. The corn is in late, we we see what it does. Stuff like that keeps us doing what we do.
Monday night, to quote some guys I used to work with up around Cullowhee, NC, ” They hell, it fell a flood” We got 1.6 inches in about 30 minutes. We appreciate it but geez…
Best definition I have run across is from Local Harvest:
“For a while now, many of us have used the word ‘local’ as shorthand for food that meets a certain, somewhat ineffable quality standard. In this context, ‘local’ means something like this: This food is grown near here, on a human scale, by people who care deeply about the land and make thoughtful, conscientious choices for its stewardship. It is nutritionally intact and fantastic tasting. It thrives here, unpropped by excessive resources or technology. Its history is knowable and unsullied.”
“local” has been corrupted just like the term “organic”. A chef friend of ours asked his wholesale distributor what they meant by local and was told it was anywhere they could get a truck to in 24 hours. Not round trip, one way. That makes CA, Mexico, and Canada local…
My brother Rick and I attended the 9th annual NC State worm conference last week and it was great. There were folks there from 16 states and 3 countries.
I have to admit that there were a lot of odd folks there. Apparently, I was the only normal guy there amongst all the worm geeks and nerds… Go figure.
We were issued a challenge by Tom Herlihy of Worm Power, the biggest worm guy in the US. He processes 30, 000 lbs of dairy manure solids a day with worms. His challenge to us, which is now your challenge in the Laughing Owl Worm Poop Name Change Contest, is to come up with a better consumer-friendly term to describe worm poop. Current terms are worm castings, worm manure, vermicompost, None of these make any sense unless one is already involved with worms and hip to the lingo. You mention these phrases to most people and they look at you like you are some kind of weirdo worm nerd.
Being hip to worm lingo does not make me a geeky nerd, I swear…
Info on vermicomposting.
The goal of the this contest is to come up with a descriptive and consumer-friendly name for earthworm poop used as a soil amendment and organic fertilizer. Give it your best shot. Not looking for cutesy. Winner, if there is one, gets 50 lbs of Laughing Owl worm fill in the blank.
I will admit to drinking the kool-aid concerning worm crap. We potted up 600 tomato, 300 eggplant, and 200 peppers in 4.5″ peat pots and the potting soil mix was 20% worm compost. We bought a 1500 lb. box of the stuff. Some of the best transplants we have ever raised. When we transplanted them out, we added two cups of worm compost to each hole and the results are impressive.
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