Air, Sunlight, Soil, Seed, and Water

Summer proceeds, and in high contrast to last year's drought we've had generally cool weather with regular soaking rains. Still, the first half of July was dry and we eventually resorted to irrigating the gardens. The tripod-mounted sprinkler head is a welcome addition to the toolkit, eliminating the hassle of trying to clamp a conventional sprinkler to the top of the stepladder.

In this, the east garden, the squash and pickling cucumbers are going great guns, but the other cucurbits have had problems. The gherkins failed altogether – I suppose the seed rotted in the wet conditions after planting, and the melons (an original planting and a second variety that replaced the gherkins) have barely covered their mounds and are just now beginning to flower. The sweet potato vines, so lush last year, barely get going before the deer browse them back to nubbins, a cycle that has repeated several times so far. I'll be surprised if we get a crop. The russets on the other hand have produced a lot of top growth and I suspect are also doing well down below. Potatoes are a solanaceae – the nightshade family that also includes tomato, eggplant, chili pepper, and tobacco – and are seldom browsed by mammals. (Sweet potato is a convolvulaceae, the plant family that also includes morning glories.)

The volunteer sunflowers are doing great but, as last year, the birds are eating the seeds from the flower heads even before they mature.

The sweet corn is more than eight feet high and the ears are now filling. The stalks are quite slender and a few have remained lodged after being knocked down in one or another of the thunderstorms. The height and fragility makes me suspect an excess of potassium in the soil, though we've done very little fertilizing either this year or last.

This is the dill patch, which I finally cleared of purslane and other weeds than put down a thick layer of grass clippings as mulch. We're using the flower heads for pickling rather than the feathery sprigs. These plants should self-seed and we can look forward to a permanent patch of dill back here by the perennial asparagus.

I've done lots and lots of weeding, mostly but by no means only purslane, and applied lots of grass clippings to suppress new growth. Eventually, cultivation should stop bringing new weed seeds to the surface where they can sprout, as the buried seed supply becomes exhausted, but that could take years. Mulching is an alternative or complementary strategy, leaving just enough soil exposed for the desirable plants.

A Week Later, A Week Ago

Every few days in June, an energetic storm system or three passed through, leaving anything from an inch to five inches of rain. The creek got out of its banks, just a bit, on several occasions but the pond level rose above the outlet pipe only once. I made this series of photos on June 28.

This is milkweed. These flowers somehow end up as the large seedpods that burst with down in the fall.

Day lilies and various grasses near the pipe spillway.

Wild grape added to the mix at the edge of the pond.

This plant, I do not know its name, makes nasty prickles.

Poison ivy in one of its manifestations. Our mowing and spraying last year, or weather and different competition – for whatever reason there is much less poison ivy this year in the trafficked and managed areas.

Another of our nemeses: thistle. I spent a lot of time last year with spade and machete eradicating thistle, and this year there has only been a small fraction of last years' plant numbers, maybe one percent.

The wild grape gets everywhere, an ongoing challenge to manage.

Down in the woods, the storms knocked over dead trees and brought down limbs. It's all pretty wild looking.

Every day that was too wet to get into the garden was a day I watched helpless as the purslane closed in on my little intended plants. The yards dried more quickly and I reckoned I would harvest more grass clippings to spread as mulch once I could work in the gardens.

I piled up lots of clippings. Three days later, when I began to spread them, I plunged my hands into one of the piles and nearly burned them. The clippings were in a state of advanced decomposition, and too slimy to spread around crops.

The sweet corn is nevertheless pretty well mulched with newspaper and clippings, and though the last big storm (which spawned a tornado in nearby Muscatine) knocked over the entire crop, it stood back up after a few days and has now closed the rows. As this occurs in other crops as well, the weeds will be more shaded and outcompeted.

The tomatoes have filled their cages and seem to be thriving; they're flowering.

We inherited the concord grape vines and a couple mature apples trees. Both are bearing heavily this year.

The Kitchen Gardens Take Off

On June 21 I carried a stepladder around with me to make this series of photographs. At this point I had just done the second succession planting of greens and roots, seen in the foreground in this first image. We were getting frequent heavy thunderstorms that kept me out of the gardens for days at a time. I harvested many wheelbarrow-loads of grass clippings as mulch to suppress the purslane. Where I first put down a layer of newspaper, or put down a really thick layer of clippings (3-4"), the mulch has been mostly successful.

Because the native soil and my compost is so full of seeds, for this planting I made a seed bed and covered the seeds with a commercial topsoil mix from a gardening supplies place. It's proving quite good at keeping the weeds a couple initial inches away from the seedlings, where they can be pulled out without danger of damaging them.

In the foreground below are rows of onions and carrots, nominally, but what you're seeing is almost all purslane. Now that I've got these rows weeded for the time-being, the vegetables are doing much better.

Also: chard, lettuce, mustard, turnip, beet, pepper, cabbage, strawberry, kale, dill, basil, sage, chives...

Looking back the other way: the machine shed and the garage.

Sweet corn of a couple varieties, bush beans of five varieties, tomatoes of five varieties, concord grapes...

This is the east garden, this year growing pickling cucumbers, two varieties of melon, pie squash, volunteer giant sunflowers, the asparagus patch, and sweet potato and russet potato behind.

In the Merry Wet Month of May

In high contrast to last year's drought and heat wave, which was well underway in May, this spring has been long, cool, and wet. Perhaps at least partially due to the different weather, we notice many other differences in how the plant and animal populations are expressed. The later onset of warmer temperatures meant that I saw lots of flowering plants and trees that last year I missed by not arriving here on the farm until mid-April.

Whether through the action of squirrels or the whimsy of previous residents, there are patches of tame flowers in unexpected places away from the farmstead, for instance the bearded iris near Eye Chair, the day lilies along the dam and in the road ditch, and these daffodils on the far side of the pond.

This crabapple was festooned with blossoms, though a bit past its prime and beginning to leaf out by the time I made this photograph.

I'm not a skilled botanical taxonomist and so can only say that these looked up close like tiny bleeding heart flowers.

Here are some trillium amidst the dandelions in a sunny spot in the woods.

And – oh dear, that telephone camera doesn't work very well – a wild variety of violet.

The machine shed is flanked on each side by large forsythia bushes, brilliantly golden for about a week. This poor plant grew rapidly afterward, became top-heavy, and suffered a lot of damage in one of the fierce thunderstorms we've had in the past two months. We'll cut it back, and thin it out, and it should be all right again in a year or two. To the right is one of the red raspberry trellises, and in the background you can see the cider apple orchard.

More flowering trees.

At several locations throughout the woods appeared colonies of May apples like these. Once Frank B. identified them for me, I began to see them everywhere. At this time one could still walk easily through the woods but the undergrowth has become rank and impenetrable. Any excursion off the paths is now a steamy, sweaty, scratchy affair with a guarantee of discovering wood ticks afterward.

Lyme disease, carried by deer ticks and other kinds of ticks, is not a great concern in this area, unlike, say, many parts of Wisconsin. Deer ticks are tiny, pinhead-sized creatures, and I've yet to find anything to identify as such, but the wood ticks are very evident, visually and by their movements on one's skin. Squeamishness is pointless, but one does become hypersensitive to, for instance, the feel of arm hairs on sleeves: Was that something moving? The ticks don't settle down for about a day so we almost always find them before they've bitten, and then it's important to not let them escape or they'll climb the furniture and jump on you again!

The second and third week of May are when morel mushrooms tend to emerge, and I had luck enough to find a nice patch of these delicious fungi. Sautéed and in a cream sauce, served over small grilled steaks – oh, so good. Those we didn't eat fresh went into the dehydrator. Some people around here go crazy for morels and we saw classified ads from restauranteurs and others offering up to $60 a pound.

Diligent readers may recall that last fall we recovered a large corrugated metal pipe (CMP) culvert from the creek. It had evidently been placed as a creek crossing but being considerably undersized had washed out. We dragged it with the tractor to the other side of the farm where a tributary flows from The Narrows at the lane and the terraces in the observatory field above.

Re-establishing a crossing here is part of the larger plan to have tractor access to the entire farm without having to use the county road. We found some 6-inch diameter flexible plastic drain pipe just downstream, washed out like the CMP, and again obviously grossly undersized for the application. Good rule of thumb: the pipe area should be about the same as the stream cross-section!

This little stream is ephemeral, that is, it doesn't flow all the time. During a relatively dry spell, Alan used a spade to square and level the channel, then placed a load of gravel as bedding. He set two stout poles at an angle in the channel, then rolled the CMP over the edge where it rested against the poles. He then eased the poles out, lowering the culvert into place.

Next, more gravel to fill the gaps on either side, and the excavated soil on top. Et voilà.

It's barely wide enough for the tractor but didn't have to be. It's smoothed out since this photo was made and now looks a pretty darn professional installation.

The hillside that descends from the lane to the culvert crosses a line of seeps and we had to build a bit of roadway before we could complete the project.

Alan's first attempt to work in the project area was timed a little prematurely, before we realized we needed the roadway, and the tractor just slipped in the mud as he tried to ascend. Donna pulled him out with the pickup. Motive force!

Well, my goodness – I should have separated this post into chapters. Thank you for your forbearance, dear readers. Also in May, we spent an interesting Saturday morning in historic Kalona, about an hour away, at the annual exotic animal sale, alternating between the small and large animal auctions. Based on so-far-limited research at the auction cafes where we've eaten, it appears that the Methodist women make tastier pies than the Amish women (I know this will be controversial – please keep your comments civil).

And then, finally, the weather was warm enough and the ground dry enough to get into the gardens. This next photo shows the soil manufactory, which is to say the compost pile. We collected plenty of raw material over the past year but I was not diligent in the layering and turning operations. A lot of the material broke down pretty well and when screened produced a beautiful topsoil-like compost, just the kind of high organic content stuff we need to improve the tilth and fertility of the garden soil. But it hadn't been cooked (by microbial action) to a high enough temperature to kill the seeds it contained.

Everything I planted using this compost as bedding for seed came up with lots of cucurbits (melon, squash, etc.) and tomatoes, and I've been paying the price since, weeding on my hands and knees. Not to mention the purslane, as overwhelming as last year. More on the gardens in future posts...

Oh yes, the cider apples. Next post.

And the gnats. Ye gods, the gnats.

An Expression of the Season

On February 28 and March 1 we had another substantial snowstorm, and afterward brilliant blue skies and calm winds and dazzling celestial displays in the night. I bundle up and take my walks, frequently stopped in my tracks by the impact of my surroundings: awe and joy at the perfection of form and texture, light and shadow, snatches of birdsong and the silences in between.

The east garden, its row of asparagus and the sweet potato mounds:

Squeaky Tree:

Lobster Tail Trail:

Toward the north fence line and the draws with coyote dens:

Big Bucket Trail:

The ancient hickories at Turkey Holler:

The Gorge:

The Grand Traverse:

Approaching Tire Shrine:

The Ford:

Hidden Meadow:

Across the top of the Trap Range:

 

Below the dam:

Rabbits congregate beneath this maple near the burn barrel:

The bridge-to-be, and across the dam, the pond and the terraced observatory field: