Home Sweet Farm: Day 11 (6/25/12): Rain, Rain, Come Our Way

I decided to catch up on my blog posts at breakfast. Apparently that wasn’t going to happen. There was no bread for toast, no cereal, and just one egg, so my options were limited to just oatmeal, although I got to make it the old-fashioned way on the stove. Not only does this take a little longer, but Sage came down and asked for some, too. Apparently Gil had buckwheat crepes, which sounds awesome.

I had checked the forecast this morning and it called for an 80% chance of rain and there would be thunder. It was overcast this morning, but no rain in sight – just a TON of mosquitoes. Mary had Katie show me how to turn on the drip line¹ for the tomatoes and then I headed down to Field 6 to finish planting the flowers from the day before. I finished the entire row, leaving some extra Celosia², and continued weeding Field 4. Mary had said that now is the worst of the weeding we’ll do, but it’s still my bane. It’s extremely difficult to weed foot-high grass with a 6”-high stirrup hoe. Not only was I weeding, but I got a nose bleed and a major bug caught in my eye. I had to wait a while to get the bug out since I was so far away from the house.

The kitchen was still rather barren of meal food, but Gil broke out some frozen hot dogs from the freezer. Kenya answered my prayers by surprising us with a whole wheat loaf of bread from the farmstand. So, a meal we had. While eating, it began pouring. Mary had to readjust our assignments for the day because weeding, which both Katie and I were doing, is useless when wet. Mary had Katie show me how to transplant peppers. We got sweet pepper, hybrid specialty sweet pepper, hybrid jalapeño pepper, and hot chile pepper seedlings from the upper hoop house, as well as some False Queen Anne’s³ included in those trays for some reason. In the garden center of the barn, Katie showed me how to transplant. We gently pulled the seedlings out of their small pots (~3”x3”x3”), keeping the roots in tact as much as possible, not needing to keep soil from that pot, and transplanted them into a hole made by my finger in a larger pot (~5”x5”x5”) filled with soil to the top. We keep a big bucket of soil in the garden center, recycled from seedling pots that aren’t able to grow their seedling. Kenya was organizing seedling trays in the garden center with me, and she explained to me all about her diabetes and diabetes in general, and patiently answered all of my questions. She said that they don’t know why people get Type-1, but Type-2 can run in families, and I explained that it runs in mine.

Although it was still raining substantially, I told Mary that I was willing to go outside. She wanted me to pick peas for CSA. Me wearing my raincoat, shorts, and sneakers, and Kenya in her raincoat, rain pants, and boots, walked down to Field 4 where the peas were. I was to pick Snap Peas⁴, only the big ones and leave the smaller ones to grow, and Shelling Peas⁵, only the fat ones and leave the skinny ones. Kenya said that the Shelling Peas were plenty ready to be picked, and that many of them would go bad if not picked immediately. I could taste that because a couple that I tried (the perks of harvesting vegetables – taste-testing) that had huge peas weren’t very tasteful. I also had to avoid yellowing pea plants because although the peas around there were nice and big, they were starting to shrivel inside and had an awful aftertaste. Katie came to help after a while, and we had our jacket hoods as tight as possible around our faces to avoid the mosquitoes that were everywhere. We finished the row at 6 today. When we headed up, we were pleasantly surprised to have Kenya share a few strawberries that she and Sage had picked that morning (a family friend had taken them strawberry picking).

After showering the mud off of me from kneeling while picking peas, I returned to my room only to be scared the bajeezies out of me by Sage who was hiding under my bed, still in my room from before my shower. Apparently she had been playing with my phone, too, and had called her mom by accident (send button>send button). Katie and I started our Monday Movie Night by watching Big Fish. We stopped for delectable dinner of pesto pasta, cucumbers and sour cream, and salad with homemade dressing made by Kenya and Gil, and while Katie cleaned the dishes, I read some Robert Frost to Sage. While finishing our movie, Katie and I were pleasantly surprised by Gil and Sage bringing up some freshly-made strawberry shortcake made by Mary. How sweet!

¹ Drip line irrigation delivers water directly to the roots of plants through the use of small tubes that “drip” the water out to the base of the plant.