After three nights of intense worrying about freezing temperatures killing our crops, today is like a beautiful blessing. Some of the trees are starting to turn color but I think it’s partly due to stress from all the dry weather we’ve had. Yes, we had rain, but only a sprinkle or a little more. Not enough to do much good until the one we had on Tuesday. That one was very nice and gave us hope for a good harvest of nice Kuroda carrots, after all.
Yesterday, we hosted a group of folks from Orr, Minnesota, north of us. We toured the gardens and let them sample lots of tomatoes. Even to us, it’s amazing all the different flavors our tomatoes have. A lot of the kids remarked on that as they ate another and another piece. It was so fun!
Will’s waiting for haybine parts again. It seems they sent him the wrong ones — again! While he’s waiting, he’s been out in the woods, gathering up what we call small wood. That’s dead branches that are very dry but have no bark left. And he’s been cutting up our big, beaver-cut logs we had left from two years ago. The splitter is hooked up to the tractor and we’ll be splitting wood soon. Right now, he’s repairing the plank fence of the cow yard and working on the back of the run-in shed. Cows are hard on fences of any kind but stout electric and over the last year, they broke several of the planks on the fence. As we want to get them corralled for a while, until the gardens are harvested, to avoid any break ins, the fence has to be in perfect shape to hold them in. Of course, they’d rather eat green grass than dry hay!
Our apples are wonderful this year. Some of our young trees are starting to bear and a couple of the culinary crabs, like Trailman and Chestnut are simply loaded. I’ll have to get them picked and get busy making apple slices, apple juice, apple butter and applesauce. Today, I’m getting busy and seeding out the kazillion tomatoes waiting in crates out on the porch.
— Jackie
