Tractor Work

Easter Sunday turned into an absolutely beautiful day, so while our holiday dinner cooked, the entire family went out into the 2nd Garden plot to work.

Grammy weeded, I planted, Ryan tilled the soil (for the third time this year!) with the tractor, and Gramps "spotted" to make sure Ryan didn't accidentally back into a fence or something equally bad (we have a strict rule on the property: absolutely no tractor work unless there is someone else there to watch you!).

If you've ever read "Little House on Prairie," you may remember that in the last half of the book you hear the description of a "sod garden" - this is basically what we have here on the property. No amount of tilling (and never mind trying to weed those two ENORMOUS areas!) ever gets rid of the grass completely. The point is to work the soil enough times BEFORE planting in order to give the garden veggies time to outgrow the grass.

I once had a rather rude guest snippily ask me why I "'let' my garden go to weeds?" After promptly smacking them (I'm just kidding, though the thought was indeed tempting!), I replied that there is no "letting" the weeds in. It's more a matter of, after a certain point, you just give up and let the weeds do what they will, because the vegetables are large enough to out compete them. Considering that every year I have an enormously varied and successful garden harvest, I don't think that I'm doing anything wrong. Clearly, the grasses aren't choking out the plants to a point that affects my harvest. In any case, we have found what works best for us in our garden, and that is the method we are sticking to. In the end, that's all that matters.

Crazy Weekend (What Else is New?)

Our unusually-high levels of weekend insanity began Friday evening, when I made the mistake of asking Ryan to use the tractor to till my 2nd Garden. It's pretty much been raining here constantly for as long as my short term memory can remember. Friday showed a small break in the weather, and I thought that it would be a GREAT time to clear out the muck in the donkey pasture and put it on the garden! What I didn't take into consideration is that I should have given the soil a full day to dry out. Oooops. So, the tractor got a little stuck...okay, a LOT stuck...as in, literally "knee deep (or axle deep) in sh*t." Poor Ryan had to shovel the thing out. Don't worry - I made sure to buy him a LARGE beer later that evening! So on Saturday, we mostly ran errands: I purchased Adirondack Blue potatoes from a local gardening store, and new luxury bed sheets for the Apothecary Suite. The weather stayed relatively dry throughout the day, so that by the time late afternoon came, the soil in the 2nd Garden was dry enough to try another go at tilling it. This time: SUCCESS! So now, my 2nd Garden is completely tilled and ready for all of its planting! We also managed to get the first tilling/amending performed on the Pasture Garden that day too. I was pretty pleased!

I noticed on Friday that my turnip seeds and kohlrabi seeds were germinating in the 2nd Garden! Yay! Sunday morning, we planted a fennel/dill raised bed.

Sunday was the truly crazy day. I had read in the weather report that we were due for a severe wind/rain storm in the afternoon. So, after some quick gardening tasks in the morning, Ryan and I decided to head out and do a little relaxing and wine tasting before the storm hit (what can I say? We have either great or terrible timing...I can't tell which...). We wandered out to Wooldridge Creek Winery, where there were friendly staff, great wines, a warm fire, and a napping kitty. In short, a wonderful place to spend an afternoon! We had just finished our wine tasting, when we were offered a glass of wine (on the house) and the chance to sit and chat for a while longer. Wisely, we accepted. I was about two sips into my glass when the storm hit. Lightning, hail, winds so high that they sounded like a train coming at us, and practically horizontal rain fall! The wind blew the rain so hard that water came pooling in under the doors. At that point, the power went out. Thankfully, we had wine and a roaring fire, so all of us just sat and chatted some more until the worst of it died down. I have to say, that's not a bad way to spend a blackout! When the worst of the storm seemed to have passed, Ryan and I ventured back out to the car and homeward. Signs of the storm were EVERYWHERE in the tree fall and debris on the road. This was a doozy of a storm. When we got home, we said a little prayer of thanks for the front gate (which is electric, but has a back-up battery just for situations such as this) which still opened to let us in. The power was out at our property too (pretty impressive, since the winery was technically in Grants Pass!), so Ryan and I decided to use our gas-powered log splitter to get a big stack of firewood and then get both woodstoves going. First we checked on the neighbors and my grandparents, making sure everybody was ok and had everything they needed. Then, we lit candles, and played board games by the warmth of the living room woodstove. Dinner was cold leftover hamburgers from Saturday evening's cooking session. Finally, we decided to call it a night and crawl into bed. About 9:30 pm or so the power came back on, but blipped out again for a bit later in the evening. I was thankful that the night wasn't too cold since my greenhouse is powered by electric heaters, but if I had had to, I could have kept it warm using the living room woodstove. I suppose that is the benefit of having a greenhouse attached to your living room!

So that, in short, was our crazy weekend. No one can ever claim that life around here is boring!