Help has arrived

When visiting other farm blogs, I sometimes wondered how someone could (presumably) work all day on the land and then still have energy to write about it. The question remains unanswered for me.

Not that we've been working on the farm all day. My parents are visiting the island for the summer and my dad seems to be enjoying helping us grow food as he did in his childhood (instead of the horse-plowing and tyrannical father he's got machine-plowing and tyrannical son). Working 8 hours a day would be a big day for us; we tend to take afternoons off or at least work them in the shade.

For the last week and a half, the weather's been great, maybe even too hot a few days for the plants but great for swimming. Cusheon Lake is surprisingly warm and the kids have really enjoyed being goofy there, especially after their hike-heavy days in camp. Large family meals, sometimes with extra guests, often consume the evening and some of the afternoon. It's not my intention to sound like I'm complaining; just explaining why this post is a long time coming.

Since the last post, we have spent an unbelievable amount of time preparing a clean double-bed for carrots and another double bed for salad greens, spinach, turnips and beet greens. We have hilled the fingerling potatoes, layed more mulch for the squash, installed reemay and dripline on the brassica beds, prepared Varijet irrigation for the salad greens beds, recovered from a windstorm, designed a market stand, prototyped some prepared foods for the stand, collected a couple of laundry sinks and done a little bit of landscaping and a couple of minor kitchen renovations. P has embarked on what we think will be an excellent product line; winter plant starts. She and my mom went nuts on seeding small pots a couple days ago.

The row crops are generally growing well although the pac choi is bolting and getting eaten (the reemay was too late getting on and, now, increasing the heating underneath for a crop that would prefer cooler conditions). All the potatoes look good, the tomatoes have no blight in a blight-heavy year and the carrots, using a germination technique that local gardening guru Linda Gilkeson recommended, are coming up nicely. I have much more to say on all of this but, for now, I will leave it at that.