It is a mystery

1. I was at my parents over the weekend, didn't really feel like I was working hard, but at the end of the weekend, I had cleaned 2/3 of the garlic, mowed the grass in the  raspberries, some of the blueberries and the tops off the weeds in the new strawberry planting, built a jig for assembling pallet wood racks/holders then assembled three of them (take one pallet, lay on it's side in the jig, cut four triangles of shitty old plywood, stick other two pallets in jig so it forms a U shape, screw triangles onto exposed side to attach all pallets, flip upright and attach other two triangles, tadaa you have a wood storage unit that can be forked), and cultivated one of the strawberry fields. And did a half day of remote work. If anyone wants mediocre garlic (small or has blemishes), for the cost of shipping them to you, I can send whatever quantity of garlic you would like (biosecurity laws apply!). I have 3/4 bushel here that I can mail out. Message me! I'm pausing growing garlic for at least a year or two, but I'm selling my seed stock to a friend who will sell it back to me for the same price when I start growing it again. 

2. I played a lot of video games over the weekend, which is partly why I felt like I wasn't doing much. I had been on a Zeldy kick when my wrist hurt but I think I'm going to leave that for winter when I have more consistent time to keep track of missions and the narrative and stuff. I did start playing a game called Vintage Story (terrible name), which is essentially, Minecraft but with a focus on survival and crafting. So all the good things about Minecraft mods. You start out with literally nothing and need to knap stones, form clay and make your own food. Fighting is less useful, there are some monsters but mostly it's starvation and the wolves that get you. Delightful fun. It has singleplayer and multiplayer and I've got a singleplayer game with mods and a multiplayer game with my sister going. 

3. Work is in a weird lull. I'm taking advantage of it right now, working from home today and Friday, which means goofing off since there's not a ton to be done right now. Yesterday was checking traps in the rain, which wasn't too bad. Tomorrow is spraying a trial and taking pictures of equipment to put together a manual for using said equipment. Cabbage harvest Thursday morning. 

4. Garden stuff. I brought back two bales of straw from my parents and this afternoon I'm going to weed the garden and mulch the hell out of it. Then water it a ton. Biggest issue right now seems to be water retention, which is obviously a problem growing in sand with little dirt under it. This fall I'm going to get a truck load or two of compost and then mulch more straw over it. I did finally break my push mower two weeks ago, it never ran well but it was $100 from the front yard of a guy who repaired small engines when I really needed it last year. I'm currently debating whether to buy a used one on craigslist or new. I will probably be getting a self propelled mower, mainly because I kept putting off mowing because I didn't want to mow the hill. It's too steep for a riding mower, so I think self propelled is the way to go. If I do buy a new one, I need to decide between gas or battery and the increased cost for those sorts of questions. The grass is getting long so I need to figure that out soon. I do need to mow more often to keep the mosquitos down in the yarn and make it easier for Mara to get around. 

5. Mara is doing well, she's got more energy and is getting up on her own about half the time. She did have stomach troubles yesterday but they seem to be a one off and she seems back to normal now. 

I went out to my coworkers place on friday to do work, leek transplanting which took a while because we planted about 800. Just a few.

But! We finished up around 2:30 and I decided that if I worked fast, I could probably get the garden weeded and therefore, not need to drive out again over the weekend.

So I weeded the whole thing! The spring rows hadn't been weeded in a little while due to the weather and had larger weeds so I took a little extra time and went at them with a standard hoe. The rest of the field that I planted two weeks ago had only the tiniest weeds growing since I weeded twoish weeks ago and I whipped through it with a coleman flat hoe, which is more of a surface skimming. There was a section of the field that was a little wet and so I switched back to the standard hoe for that.
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Just a few garden things :)

It got super hot here this week and it spelled the end of frost risk for sure. If I'd been planting ideally, I would have planted last weekend but I was helping my parents plant strawberries on the farm.

Yesterday was the hottest day of the year so far, 87F so I planned my day only to do about a half day of work because I melt when I'm not used to it being so hot. It is current 68F this morning. Hot. Ew.

Got up, made the drive and collected my tools and things. I also grabbed my transplants. I had potatoes (from true potato seed), peppers, tomatoes, and sesame.

We put up some rescue irrigation for my plants this week, it has been so dry, probably two full weeks without rain and it's been at least 80F and sunny for a solid week.

How I started:


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 I went through my list of seeds and marked down what I wanted to grow this year, picking out if I was going to be saving for seed and which variety.

My "to plant" list has 90 things on it. 

Well that's not happening. Some of those things are multiple years of the same variety just so they are on the list to be used up. But still. 

 I started sorting through all my seeds in anticipation of starting some plants. As I receive seeds, I enter them in my database and mark them with their ID number so year to year, I can track which seeds were harvested from what seeds and where I got them. Then I group them by type and rubber band them so planting is easier. 

Well, apparently back in September, I bought like 30 packs of seeds and never entered them in my database. I went and looked and apparently Seed Savers was have a big sale, most of the packets were around $1.50. So I bought a ton of seeds.

And never entered them. I had a minor surprise when I opened my tub because I had just shoved them on top and I guess expected that I would remember about them before this? I have no idea. 

 I was finally able to determine why I couldn't open my garden database on my work computer, which was that I had once tried using the longnumber on my access 2019 and the access on my work computer is 2016 and just Couldn't Handle It. So I changed it to regular number, imported all the elements to a new database and voila, I can now do my garden data entry on my work computer. It will give me something to do at the north office and get it done so I can spend my evenings doing other stuff. 

At the start of last year, I built a 2019 year record with all plots, where they were in the field by row and number and added boxes for dates planted and harvested, printed it out and used it all year out in the field. So now I'm entering it in my database so I know when everything happened. I do this because I can remember all of what I planted and how it did, but now the specific dates and details, so I write them down and as I do the data entry, I can determine what I want to grow again and mark that down in my notes. 

It's also a good way to figure out what crops I really care about growing, because those are the ones with the most notes. 

I have probably half of my seeds processed and bagged up, so I think I'm going to stream spinning tonight and maybe stream doing the seed saving stuff tomorrow night so I can keep working on it. It all has to get done before I order seeds so I'd better get my butt in gear because I want to buy seeds. I am cutting back on how much I'm growing because last year was a little bit of a disaster but ehh, oh well.

I wasn't charged any more for another pound of product so I just bought a half pound of ginger. 

So if anyone wants some ginger to plant in March (in the US), let me know. I can ship some to you. I've got plans to grow them in a container inside so we'll see how this goes.  

So over Christmas break from work, I went to PA to see family. As much as I wanted snow on the ground, I actually wanted to see what my field looked like. I hadn't seen it since the end of October since there was snow cover over Thanksgiving.

Things are alive! Mostly.
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So this past weekend I went to my parents' farm to set up my field and get some planting done of the spring crops. They're ahead of where I'm currently living by a week or so. Last weekend's weather was sunny and beautiful for them, while it was thirty degrees colder here. 

 Saturday I had to wait for the ground to thaw from the overnight freeze then I disked it. I was going to rototill because I thought I would need a fine seedbed for the earthway seeder. I planted my oats to test this and the only issue I ran into was the occasional deep spot the planter would get stuck in. So I tied a rachet strap to the from of the planter and just used that to pop the front of the planter up when it would get stuck. Definitely saved me time because even though I was a little slower planting, it was still faster than taking the time to rototill the whole area. 

I planted all the peas of which I have Many, three oat varieties, two barley varieties, three ish carrot varieties, a clover variety I want to harvest seed from, aaaand the potatoes

I wasn't 100% sure on the potatoes but the weather is going to be really nice this week, warm enough that I figured I could get them in. Otherwise I'd have to wait two weeks. Worst case, my parents throw a frost cover over them. And if I screwed them up oh well. 

I also laid out all the plots and got dutch clover seeded into the aisles. 

I was going to plant the garbanzos but I don't know if they tolerate frost so I'm waiting a bit on them. 

I'll be heading back down in two weeks or so to weed, check on things, plant the garbanzos. Then sometime in May I'll plant everything else. 

 The carrots seem to have come through those hard freezes just fine, the tops are still green and they're still solid. Even the tiny Atlas ones that I've literally neglected are still alive somehow. 

For funsies I dug up one of the regular carrots and ate it and it was really sweet! Fresh carrots tend to have a sharp edge to them, this one didn't at all. The only thing is that because of those freezes, the skin of the carrot was really tough and weird. I couldn't chew it like the rest of the carrot and it was really unpleasant. I ended up peeling the carrot. 

Otherwise super super delicious and I would definitely do that again. Too bad I'm trying to keep them for seed because I would eat all of them.