Category: Farm life

Magically on the first day of summer, the first raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries in my garden all have ripened. I love this time of year!

Most years we don’t have enough dry weather to make hay until July, by which time the grass is so mature and woody that the hay it makes isn’t palatable to horses. But this year early June has been dry, so we harvested this beautiful hay. Toby the cat approves.

State officials announced today that Washington State has produced 148 million bushels of apples.  I think this number is wrong because I am pretty sure they did not count the 9 bushels produced by my apple trees.

My three Italian prune plum trees are loaded with ripe fruit, so it is time to dry them to make prunes. The picture shows my system for drying the plums.  The plums are sliced in half and the pits are removed.  The fruit is placed on drying racks, and the racks are placed on my green house.  Under a hot Autumn sun, the temperature in the greenhouse reaches 110 degrees.  I use a 5W solar panel to power a small 12 V DC fan rescued from a dead computer.  The fan blows on the hot plums, speeding the drying process.  The same system works great for making sun-dried tomatoes.

For the last 15 years each year it has been a competition with the birds to see whether they or I pick the most blueberries, but I never really knew how much the birds were getting. I never had a yield of more than 3 pounds of berries from my three bushes during this period and the berries never lasted on the bushes for more than a week. This year, for the first time, I shrouded the bushes in Remay as soon as the berries started to ripen. Amazingly, I have picked 20 pounds so far, over a period of 2 weeks, and the bushes are still completely loaded with berries, so it looks like the Remay has increased my yield about ten-fold.

A few months ago I stocked the one acre pond on my property with 205 5″ rainbow trout. Yesterday evening as I sat by the pond sipping a glass of merlot, I heard the distinctive rattle of a belted kingfisher as it flew the length of the pond and then perched in a tree on the far bank. I had more or less forgotten about it when suddenly it swooped into the pond with a tremendous splash, emerged with a trout in its powerful beal, and landed on a branch directly over my head. The trout was only slightly smaller than the bird. The kingfisher bashed the trout’s head on the branch a couple of times to knock it unconscious and then flew away. So I guess now I have 204 trout.

Weather is warming at last, and a few days with minimal rainfall has the garden soil dry enough to till. Now have 100 tomatoes in gallon cans under cloches in the garden. 16 tomato plants, 5 cucumber plants and one melon plant are planted, through black plastic, under a cloche. Three days ago (Sat.) finally planted all the potatoes. Usually, this time of year, they all would be badly sprounted. This year, with the extended cold weather, they are just starting to sprout, and in perfect shape for planting.