07/07/13

Yesterday was much more productive than Saturday had been. When I woke up, I could tell that the creek was up, by the sound. I walked down to see if anything had flooded. While our crossing to the garden was high, it didn't look like water had gotten into the garden from that side. When I walked down to the road, though, I found that the ditch had overflowed again, causing water to backup into the garden. I couldn't tell if the entire garden was impacted or not, but the tomatoes, peppers, and onions were definitely under water.

After that I decided to get out the push mower, and try to mow the front yard. I was about to get in about an hour before it started raining. It wasn't very hot, but with 99% humidity, it was miserable. After lunch, it stopped raining and the sun came out, so I mowed a bit more. It had warmed up considerably, so after mowing for a bit I decided to take a break and see if I could get to the garden. I was a bit hesitant driving across the swiftly flowing water, until I saw that the dogs had crossed it with no problems. By that time the water had gone down, and it appeared that the only damage was that a few onions had broken blades.

My plan was to resume mowing after checking out the garden, but the mower would not start back. I suspect the problem is the spark plug, because I had this happen before. Since I don't have an extra plug, I just left it sitting and went back into the house. A few hours later I went back out to try again, and it fired right up. It was still hot, so I didn't mow for a long time, but was able to get everything close to the house mowed, including around the bird feeders, clothesline, and herb garden.

This evening, once it cooled off, Andrea and I went back over to the garden to take care of a few things.  The biggest thing that we needed to do was to add some levels to to the trellis for the tomatoes. Some of the plants have grown as tall as the posts, so we added two more levels. We also added the first level for the peppers, although only a couple of the plants are tall enough to actually use it at this point. The corn is looking good, but I wanted to give it a shot of nitrogen, so I poured nine ounces of urine around the base of each plant. My goal is to use nothing by urine and bone meal as nitrogen sources for the corn this year, to see how well that works. While I was fertilizing the corn, Andrea fertilized the peppers, with some balanced organic fertilizer.

Before finishing up we dug the rest of the onions, which were all decent sized. I then dug some more of the Yukon Gold potatoes, because we need some to eat on. I finished digging up the half row that was not prepped with compost, and the results were fairly disappointing, although there are a few good sized ones. I haven't weighed them yet, to see what the total yield for that row was. We also dug up a few of the Inchellium Red garlic, before I decided that they really needed a few more days before harvest so the paper could thicken up.

It was nice to have a productive day, after so many days of being rained out. Hopefully this trend will continue, but I'm not all that hopeful, since the forecast still calls for a chance of rain every day.