It’s been a busy week on the farm, we’ve reseeded some pasture areas damaged by our geothermal install last year, pulled eleventy billion weeds, trimmed trees, planted more vegetables, done more work on the pool garden and added both our Drone wing spice mix and Rhubarb/Strawberry Jam to the store!
Somedays it feels like we’re so far behind so I have to remind myself that 3 weeks ago today was our last frost. It was so late that many lost entire gardens worth of plants. I’ ve managed to keep adding a little more every day and my yearly battle with the weeds is doing better than last year thanks to some generous applications of mulch and daily skirmishes in the trenches.
The pool garden test is working out very well so far. Soil was delivered June 2nd, we formed 3/4 beds June 12th and started planting then too. Just over a week later we have beets, radishes, corn and sunflowers all starting. Potatoes, more radishes and spinach have been added recently as well. The 4th bed is also the soil entry point for the garden so it’s not going to be a bed per se this year to allow me to access extra soil if needed for erosion or settling. Instead I’m going to toss a few pumpkin plants into the hill of dirt to cover it all.
The baby orchard is doing quite well although like most of Ontario we are valiantly fighting off the gypsy moth caterpillars. I’ve been doing daily inspect and kill missions but recently learned about burlap on the trunks to keep them out of the leaves so I’ve wrapped all the fruit trees and hopefully that will reduce the squishing required! We are happy to see a few Honeycrisp apples on the trees and also seeing a few plums on our fall clearance tree purchases. We are down one of this years cherry saplings, looks like a deer snack. The others are looking like next year to produce but that’s not unexpected.
With Rhubarb/Strawberry finished for now I’m picking up 8l of strawberries today to get some pure strawberry jam on the shelf. I’ll also freeze a few berries for some late fall hot sauce experimentation. I want to branch out to a few new flavours this year and fruit is on my potential ingredient list!
Speaking of peppers, a quick warning – last call for pepper seedlings. We’ve got one cool night coming up Tuesday, so anything not sold by Tuesday night I’m taking off the store and planting Wednesday morning. I’m putting the holdover plants into the pool garden so we can determine if that’s actually the best place to be planting peppers.
And so I’m off to my to do list and I’ll leave you with last nights amazing sunset. Have a fabulous day!
Love from the farm!