Well the weather has certainly warmed up recently. But it has brought with it some problems. The first one being the millions of grasshoppers hatching in the field. They have all made a beeline for my vegetable patch and eaten all the leaf material off my potato plants. I have had to dig them up and I only got about five pounds of new potatoes from them. I was hoping for a lot more, but it's all a learning curve. I will try and get some row covers before I plant anything else in that bed. They have now taken a like to my onion stalks, so I may be digging them up this week. The only other thing I have growing in those beds are some peanuts.
The other problem has been the heat preventing anymore than an hour or so work each morning. We are also experiencing a bumper crop of ticks this year,, so every time we come in from the field we have to check for the little bloodsuckers. I hate them with a vengeance and really enjoy killing any I find.
We have been busy every other evening picking blackberries. So far we have about five gallons of berries and there are still lots more to come. The birds seem to be letting us have all the pick of them this year.The mulberry tree on the west side has had a good crop of berries too, and it has been a grazing stop for us when ever we have passed it.
I have also been cutting hay, but on a small scale. I have been using a trimmer with a brush blade on it to cut the grass, leaving it in windrows throughout the week and then the family workforce goes into action every Saturday morning to bring it all to the barn where we have been making square bales with a homemade hand baler I made. So far we have just over a dozen bales that I will keep for litter for when we eventually get the chickens.
The orchard trees continue to flourish, even though we have had hardly any rain. I did have a worrying day or two when I found Japanese beetle on them, but I sprayed everything with soap spray and it seems to have stopped them.
More fruit is growing in the kitchen garden. We have some watermelons growing and the kids are looking forward to cutting them up. I actually prefer honeydew melons. I think they have lots more taste to them and they don't feel like you are eating water. We bought some recently and I happened to comment that it would be cool to save the seeds and try to grow some. Well I got ignored and the seeds were tossed onto the compost heap. A week or so later we had honeydew melons growing in the compost heap. Lea Ann tried to transplant some into the kitchen garden but they died off. Luckily she had left some on the compost heap so we are letting those grow and will see what happens. I love free food.
Future projects include a hoop house greenhouse, fed with water from a rainwater catchment fitted behind the barn. It will also irrigate the vegetable beds. I may eventually build an aquaculture system in the greenhouse with a wind generator to charge the batteries powering the water pump.
I also want to convert an old tiller into a walk behind tractor, so I can build attachments to use around the farm such as grass rake, snowplow, chain harrow and seed drill. Eventually all the gas engines will be replaced with electric motors with the batteries being charged by solar and wind power.
