Man, plants grow quickly!
Posted on August 23, 2007 - Filed Under animals, dog, farm maintenance, greenhouse, plows, prayer, rattlesnake, tractor, vegetables
This is very exciting. We’re already seeing results from our first “fall” planting! Of course, I’ve found this is the easiest part: getting a teensy plant to pop out of the soil. The hard part comes later when you’re trying to maintain the baby fruits, protecting them from weird ailments and bugs, so they can grow big and delicious so you can eat them! But this first stage is very cool. So far, I’ve seen 1 broccoli, several beets, a few cilantro, a handful of baby carrots and 3 edamame. Well, let me be clear, I haven’t actually seen the vegetables just the sprout of the plant of the vegetable.
I’ve been working really hard to clear out the weeds in the pasture garden. I finished up the tomatoes yesterday and began working on giving the strawberry popcorn some breathing room. Tomorrow, the sweet corn will get some much needed help. I hope it’s not too late to save the corn. I see baby ears on many of the stalks. I guess if it doesn’t make it, I’ll at least have some nice dried corn stalks for fall decor. Last year, I went to buy some dried cornstalks…they were almost $2 bucks each stalk. That’s more than you pay for the actual corn. That’s crazy when I pass field after field of corn every day.
John wants to build a pvc greenhouse. At first, I felt it was unnecessary, but after fighting non-stop weeds and bugs, I’m thinking it’s not such a bad idea. We would grow most of our food plants in the greenhouse and we could do it year-round. We would plant a few larger crops like corn, peanuts, wheat and sunflowers outside. Of course, that’s not going to happen without a tractor. And let me tell you tractors are expensive. Even the really old ones are listed for at least 4 grand. And a new one is a minimum of 10 grand. I read an older homesteading book where the guy said he bought an old tractor for $300. Of course, that was over 30 years ago, but that’s more our budget.
We’ve also been looking into traditional plows that you hitch up to a mule or horse. Those are expensive too, but they say for small scale farming it’s the most efficient way to go. And we would definitely be small scale. Some companies refurbish or copy old-style plows with new materials. Still others take modern day plowing tools that you would use on a motorized tractor and retrofit them to hitch to a horse instead of a machine. Pretty cool. Our neighbors would get a hoot out of that! I know they already tsk tsk when they pass us every day out in the hot sun pulling huge hunks of weeds with our hands or a manual hoe.
Buster the dog found the first rattlesnake of the season yesterday. He was barking up a storm and we were getting annoyed with him. So John finally went out to put him in the kennel. Buster kept barking around this one area by the AC unit. A fat rattler lay coiled in wait. John got the pistol while Jett and I watched from the window. 5 shots into the ground later, he was still rattling. The think didn’t even flinch once. He finally met his fate with the head of a shovel. Jett was fascinated and kept wanting to touch it. I was horrified and said a little prayer for the snake. I knew he had to go, but it’s still unfortunate for him. Lessons learned:
- you need a shotgun to properly shoot the small head of a snake
- always listen to your dog when he’s trying to tell you something
- better the rattlesnake than your dog or child
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