In the Greenhouse

The tomato plants are doing well. They’ve been planted in IRT.  I burn holes with a small propane torch.  Burning vs cutting means no flaps to cover seedlings or interfere with watering. This photo was taken before the tomatoes were planted.  To make room for them most of the beet greens were cut, bagged and taken to the local store for sale.  I left a patch of them at the far end so that we continue to have fresh greens until the crop outdoor is ready to cut.  It will be a while since it was planted just this week.  The lettuces, boc choi, and onions have to be moved back to make room for another strip of IRT for another row of tomatoes. I hate to lose the greens so we’ve been eating salads like crazy.  I’ll probably mix up a few pounds of salad, bag it and take it to the store.  I’ll take a new pic today.

A bushel of beet greens.

Weedy lettuce and two European cucumber plants.  The cucumbers will grow up strings (that I still haven’t hung).  The space the lettuce is in will be taken over by tomatoes as the plants grow.  By then we’ll have eaten all of the lettuce.  I’ll do this a little different next year.  The new greenhouse is almost done (!!!).  I’ll have that filled with our personal greens.  When it’s time to plant the warm weather crops in the greenhouse I’ll have that empty rather than reluctantly pulling them two minutes before planting.  The cucumbers and all of the tomatoes will be in IRT.  Since I didn’t do that this year I’ll be mulching them with seaweed.

The last of the Hakurei turnip has been pulled. This is a salad turnip.  I also toss slices into stirfry in the last minute or two of cooking.

What’s Growing in the Seedling House

In the seedling house:

SNAP!

About a month ago we had a serious mouse problem in the kitchen drawers. A seasoning packet was chewed open, a plastic storage container with herbs chewed through, the cover to a bottle of food coloring left over from Taylor’s history project - chewed up. Mouse turds littered the drawers. I had to leave the silverware tray on the sideboard at night. We had mouse traps set in most of the drawers. I hate these spring traps. I’m convinced I’m going to open a drawer and set one off causing it to leap into the air and snap my finger as it slams closed. I told Steve repeatedly that they can remove body parts. He laughed at me. Then he found it…a trap with a tail but…no body. I thought I had the trap set so that the mouse had to walk down a little path and go head first into the trap. SNAP! and that was supposed to be the end of the mouse. Instead, I think it sat on the inch tall seasoning bottles and hit the spring with its tail. SNAP! and there went the tail and away went the mouse.

Critters are eating seeds and seedlings and in the seedling house. I’ve caught a chipmunk and a mouse so far. I felt bad about the chipmunk but worse about the pile of seeds and dead seedlings I found. I like to think I’m an observant person. I hear a lot going on around me. I didn’t hear the little creep that dug up two squash seeds and decapitated two squash seedlings behind me as I worked yesterday. That’s a gutsy mouse. I was 10′ away! When I finished cursing the mouse I gathered the traps and brought them to the house where they were baited with peanut butter. Take that you little *&^%!!! I put them in the seedling house and came in for the day. (stop here if you’re squeamish)

A1C

Over the winter I mentioned having diabetes. This week’s to do list has A1C on it. That’s the blood test that looks at blood sugar for the past three to four months. I was 6.4 in January and that came with a warning to get it down. I’ve done most of what I was supposed to do over the winter but didn’t think I’d done quite enough. I put off the blood test for more than a month before facing up to reality. I knew it wasn’t going to be good. I didn’t follow the nutritionist and was in fact quite disgusted with that visit. If I ate processed foods I could have followed her diet. My doctor switched me to the “you know what’s good for you, eat that” non-diet. I think shoveling 64.9 million tons of snow might have helped too. My A1C is down to 5.9 and that’s the high side of normal. I’ll go back to repeat the test in the fall. My goal is to get as close to 5.0 as possible between now and then.

YEAH ME!

I should write something

I should. I should write something. How many times can I say “transplanting seedlings to six packs,” or any of the other things I do repeatedly.

The new gh is going up. I hope to transplant into it next weekend.

Something, either chipmunk or mouse, has been digging up seeds in six packs in the seedling house and eating them. It leaves the shell behind. I set three traps yesterday and caught a chipmunk quickly and a mouse over night.

This week I need to:

• climb the bleeping ladder and hang the strings in the greenhouse. I’ve procrastinated on this one.
• move the mini hoop to the seedling house so I can move some cold crops out and make room for the warm stuff
• figure out how to candle turkey eggs
• transplant seedlings into six packs
• make signs for the seedling house - explain each variety so that maybe I don’t have to repeat myself 100 times when customers come to buy seedlings
• moan about missing the laptop. Acer needs two freaking weeks to get it back to me after it’s shipped tomorrow. Toshiba had T’s back to her five days after shipping and that included a weekend. Two weeks. Ridiculous. I’m very pleased with the laptop but no more Acer for me. Customer service sucks and the turn around time is unacceptable.
• A1C tomorrow. Praying it’s below 6.5
• use the tilther to add compost to the garden
• cut trees at the pond, prune an apple tree I’m leaving there
• scarecrow of sorts to the peas and spinach plot
• weed the gh
• turn the compost pile
• move the Earth Machine and use it to finish some compost
• build one or two new piles using OPL. OPL=other people’s leaves
• roll out IRT to start warming soil for tomatoes, peppers and eggplant outside

This week I’m planting:

• potatoes
• more beet greens
• PTWG turnip
• Chards
  
• lettuce
• 10,000 carrots
• cabbage
• broccoli
• tomatillos (in the gh), replacing cold killed tomatoes in the gh
• seed pickling cucs
• replace squash seeds the chipmunk and/or mouse ate
• pot up comfrey and chives

We have volleyball tonight. If our teams lose we’re out.(We’re out) It’s fun again and I wouldn’t mind playing next week but we’re playing a very good team. Going out with the girls once a week is nice but I really do need to settle in and not quit working by 4:30 in the afternoon so that I can goof off this time of year.

ohhhhhhh I know what else I want to do this week. Jan has ducklings. All six of the eggs under the chicken hatched yesterday. I want to ooh and ahh and get my duckie fix. And speaking of ducklings, I need to boot ducks off their nests for a minute to be sure they aren’t setting on duck eggs.

Back to work. I’ve done chores but haven’t fed the trout. I’ll take the camera with me while I work today.

Rain Day

When I woke up this morning the ground was wet. Soon after it started to mist, then sprinkle. It’s raining now. It’s a gentle rain that soaks into the ground nicely. I worked outside for a couple of hours then came in to build a cozy fire and wait for Steve. He left before 4 am to go turkey hunting. He had his tom by 7 am, a 14 pounder, and is now napping in his recliner. My turn comes the week after next when Peter and Brian take me hunting.  We can’t call so they’ve volunteered.

I’m catching up on book work. My abused hands need a day off. The peas and spinach planted April 28 are up. This rain will help them along. The seedlings in the greenhouse look great except for the peppers. They don’t like the cool temps I’ve made them suffer though. I haven’t turned the heat on in the seedling house for the last two nights. They’re yellow in the morning but fine by noon. They get heat for the next four nights because the temps are going down to the 30’s. They aren’t getting much heat though. They’ll toughen up. I can’t turn on the heat at night when they’re outside in a few weeks.

Turkey Eggs

I’m going to update this as I go. I set reminders to auto-publish two days before each hatch.

UPDATED MAY 8

May 1: 25 eggs in the incubator, 12-13 under a mallard. Due to hatch May 29.

May 3: 10 eggs in the incubator. Due to hatch May 31.

There’s room for ten more eggs. Two ducks are showing signs of broodiness but they might be co-nesting. The broodiest of the two will get the eggs and the other will be booted out unless they have separate nests. They can nest together but the hatch rate is lower. As of this afternoon I can chase them off the nest without being bitten. I don’t think they’ll leave willingly tomorrow. When they are fully broody I’ll put on long sleeves, take them off the nest(s) and exchange duck for turkey eggs.

May 5: the ducks above are sharing 13 eggs.

May 8: five eggs to another duck. Total egg count is 65.

May 12: leaving eggs in a nest in the hen house.  The turkeys don’t appear to be mating now.

Great Links

I’ve been running around all day. Marketing isn’t my thing but it had to be done. My brain is fried and I still have volleyball. Vball is good for a laugh. We’re so bad it’s funny (even funnier when one of the teammates who lives and dies by sports gets pissed at us for being so bad). Rather than write, I offer up links!

Maine Food & Lifestyle - We have awesome food here!

Johnny’s Seeds - They have a new blog. I’m sure Rob will include info in the next newsletter.

From The Newsroom - News from UMaine’s Co-op extension

Counting Woodcock

I volunteer for the Department of the Interior a couple of evenings a year. This time each spring we drive to Danforth and count male woodcock in their singing grounds. Tonight was slow. The route is 3.6 miles long and takes up to 38 minutes. Tonight I counted only four males, the lowest count so far. One night next week we’ll drive to Amity to count that route.

Counting involves the exact timing of sunset plus 15 or 22 minutes depending on cloud cover. You listen for two minutes then drive .4 miles, listen two minutes then drive .4 miles, and repeat for a total of 10 stops. If the temperature is lower than 40° at starting time the count is canceled for the night. I have from April 10 to May 20 this year. Steve recorded the GPS coordinates for me on my first counts in 2006. I have to mark down the level of disturbance (no to high) and make any necessary notes. One of tonight’s notes is about stop number nine. It’s the parts yard for the wind farm. Speaking of the wind farm, there are blades on one turbine now. Four or five more are up but without blades.

That’s More Like It

A nest of duck eggs. There’s a piece of OSB (oriented strand board) leaning against a wall in the barn. I’ve been watching a nest fill with duck eggs. Ducks lay before sunrise. By the time I’m in the barn a little after 5 am the ducks have finished laying for the day and want nothing more than to go outside. Right after I said none of my birds are broody yesterday I went back to working outside. A head count in the duck pen told me someone was missing. Could it be? Yes! A duck was on this nest. She hissed at me a little but she was willing to leave the nest. I drove her out of the barn and closed the door behind her. I traded 14 duck eggs for 12-13 turkey eggs. When I went in this morning to check on her she greeted me with a hiss and the promise of a bite if I came much closer. Success! Poultlings (poult x duckling) will hatch May 28-29 IF there are viable eggs. Some of the eggs are very small. Some have been very cold but not frozen. I’m not sure all of the hens are accepting the toms. If a few hatch I’ll be satisfied.

Hey Ladies!

Come hang with us!

Women Who Farm.

Free the Ducks!

I’ve kept the ducks locked in the barn since Sunday night. I feel badly about this but I’d feel worse if they were dining on newly planted seeds in the garden. My project this afternoon is to pound the stakes for fencing, put up the fence, catch one duck at a time, clip its wings and put it out in the newly fenced pasture. I will get the stakes in and the fence up and it will probably end there. Catching ducks in that barn is a job for two people. Some of the runners might be able to go out but certainly not the mallards and mallard crosses.

I mentioned mailing soap to a customer and got snagged into making soap for someone else. I’ll make it this morning. At one time I loved it, now it’s just another thing to do. But heck, for $200, I can spend a couple of hours making soap.

Basil needs to be moved to six packs. I’ve been brushing my hand over the seedlings as they sit in the kitchen waiting to go out. They smell wonderful.

More Photos of the Same Veggies

The little seed that could. This is an onion in the onion bed in the greenhouse. The seedlings beside it came from seeds that didn’t germinate last fall. When the soil was turned over and watered the seeds kicked into action.

A note about the greenhouse - right now there are several small beds of a variety of greens. It won’t be this way next year. I will most likely have one half of each greenhouse filled with one vegetable. I’m very limited this year spring so I’ve planted it full of vegetables we love.

Wonderful Rain!

118″ of snow over the winter is long gone from this farm.  We need rain.  I planted three pounds of peas and a pound of spinach yesterday.  Today’s rain followed by four days of sunshine is a blessing for these seeds. The pond has been dropping much earlier than usual because we haven’t had spring rain. It’s a good thing the rain is late as we won’t have the flooding problem some of the state is going to experience over the next few days.  The rain on top of melting snow is a disaster waiting to happen.

I turned the heat off in the seedling house this morning.  At 4:40 am it was 42°.  I’m going back out now to work in the seedling house until the hard rain starts and it becomes too noisy.

I was wrong!

I sadly watched my much loved Blazer leave on a flatbed wrecker this morning.  I wouldn’t even go up to the house to talk to the men who came to get it.  It’s old and a little rusty.  It has a 130,000 miles on it.  But it’s comfortable.  It has bells and whistles, a sun roof, leather seats (that I will not have next time vehicle), lots of room for kids and their stuff, vegetable deliveries and anything else I need except two new speakers in the back.  I take good care of the Blazer.  I feed and water it.  Sometimes I even wash it (ok, not so much) and I take it out to socialize with other vehicles now and then.  I love my Blazer.  For all of this, it refused to leave the driveway last week. And then it refused to start so that I could get its back end out of the road and into the driveway. T and I had to push it.  I was sure it needed a new transmission.  If you put it into gear it dies.

I was wrong!  Yeeeehhhhhhaaaaaaaa!  Yippee!  Yahhhhooooooey!

It’s not going to cost close to $2,000.  It’s a little over $200 with towing included.  What a relief.  This week is going so much better than last!

After this I might show it my appreciation by both washing and waxing it.  No really!  I might!

Relief.

Coffee, Trout & Tomatoes

Not a recipe. This is where I have my first sips of coffee in the morning. I no longer dare put off checking the greenhouse. I’m out of bed and in the seedling house around 5 am these days. I take my cup of coffee with me. The heater is turned back to 1 or sometimes off depending on how warm it is outside. This morning I looked over the plants carefully. The peppers’ cotyledons are a bit yellow and it’s too early in their lives for that. I’ll let them dry out from yesterday’s watering while the seaweed tea brews. They need a good cup of tea. The cauliflower survivors (in case I didn’t already tell you, I forgot to turn the heat on one night) are bouncing back. Cauliflower is the wimpiest cold weather crop I grow. The next batch of Pac Choi, which I’ll sell most of in the gh, filled its tray over night. Gonzales and Ruby Red Perfection cabbage look fantastic.

Seaweed

Rockweed actually.  We picked up around 500 pounds of rockweed for the garden.  Steve tossed some into the chicken pen. They weren’t sure what to think for a while but were pecking away later.  I’ll start a batch of weed tea tomorrow.  That will be used to water the seedlings and the plants in the ground in the four season greenhouse.  Seaweed is full of the micronutrients typical 10-10-10 petrochemical fertilizers lack.  These are micronutrients our bodies as well as plants and other animals need to function well.

Rockweed is an excellent weed suppressant.  It would take a lot of seaweed to suppress an acre’s worth of weeds but I’ll take all the help I can get.  It’s also a good mulch.  It breaks down slowly and releases nutrients into the soil.  Some of the weed will go into a compost pile I need to rebuild after the rain stop later in the week.

This is the first of several loads we’ll bring home.  Each time we need to be in the area we’ll fill the back of the truck.

My Crappy Blog Entry

I’m following Danni and CeeCee. I tend to not talk about the crappy stuff but I do say that this year has been hard. As I’ve said 629 times before, I took last year off. I am having a hard time of getting back into the swing of things while making so making freaking changes. If I could see the results of some of these changes I might feel like I’m accomplishing something but since I can’t see anything yet I feel like I’m running in circles.

The transmission (I think, Steve doesn’t) dropped in my vehicle yesterday. The only good part of this is that I was half in the driveway, half in the road and not at the top of Cadillac Mountain. By the time it is replaced we will have spent $5,000 on vehicles in about six weeks. The first of the money came from savings, then a retroactive raise and now I guess the last of it is going to have to leaf out on a tree some where until the tax return comes back. As for the tax return, a document was lost (I didn’t do it) and that wasn’t discovered until 7 pm on April 14 (I didn’t do it) so our taxes were late. Wait again until the last day next year? Hell will freeze over and I will beat him over the head with tax forms before that happens. Can you say penalty?

So let’s see - that’s the transmission and taxes. How about how it’s a miracle I didn’t burn down the seedling house and blow up the house three nights ago. I told Danni I wasn’t writing this here but what the hell.

A Day Off

The numbers of readers has dropped to under 200 this week so it must be time to stop talking about what’s growing and add something more interesting. I took yesterday off to go to Bar Harbor with a friend.  These were taken on Sand Beach in Acadia National Park.  The sand was warm enough to walk barefoot!  If you right click on the photos and go to the image you’ll be able to see them full sized.

Hoop House

This is what happens when you forget to take the poly off a conduit hoop house before a heavy snow storm.

I hope to tackle this over the weekend.  Every time I see it I want to kick myself.