Beans and potatoes

5/29/07 Tuesday
Couldn’t get to sleep till around 3:00 this morning. It’s nice and cool so I’m gonna get as much as I can outside before it gets too hot. Plan on planting the potatoes I cut two days ago and beans in the rows I made sometime a week or so back. Actually worked goat manure into some of them yesterday. I plan on putting in the drip feed watering system on the bean rows.

I got an E mail from the Texas Organic Farmer’s & Gardener’s Association, their regular newsletter thing. There is an organic farm, Boggy Creek Farms, near Austin that is hosting a two day workshop held by TOFGA. They will teach all kinds of things I need to learn and the farm itself could well be a good model for what I would like to do. Unfortunately it costs $110 bucks so we’ll have to put that off till next year or something. I will E mail Boggy Creek to see if they would be willing to just let us come down and look. I’m sure they will. Their website is great and gives a good idea about how they operate. I don’t have near the acreage that it looks like they must have and the climate is much harsher out here but it doesn’t matter cause good ideas are still good ideas even if smaller.

Time to get out and get farming.
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It’s noon and time to take a break from the sun. Dropped the truck off at Wheeler. They don’t know how long they will keep it till they see what kind of part needs replacing. Might be two days or two hours.

Got small red potatoes and sweet potatoes planted. When I asked Cherie to buy potatoes to plant that’s all she came home with. Would like to have some good baking potatoes but this is what she likes. I’ll plant beans when I go back out. There are five rows ready to plant so I’ll pick out five types of beans. These will all be bush beans as ones that need a trellis I’m thinking of putting along the fence so they can use the fence to climb on. Plus I already have some green beans planted with the corn so they will climb on that. Back is pretty painful so I’ll need to take a pain pill. Cherie is off on her job. She’s doing well but needs to get organized and a little disciplined with it. Time to check my E mail, post this, grab a sandwich, and get back out there.
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Well I over did it. But I tend to do that. Planting beans takes a lot longer than I thought. At least for me. I got two kinds of beans planted, white runner beans and pinto beans. I’m probably doing it the hard way. I make a hole, put a dirt mixture in it and .then put the seed in. I suppose I don’t have to put the mix of potting soil, peat moss stuff and…I don’t know, whatever else I could find to throw in. It’s just that the soil here is pretty sandy and I want this stuff to grow good. I planted some seeds straight in the soil without the other stuff to see how it does. It’s all part of learning how to do this stuff. I got the hose for the drip feed watering system run but need to get more connectors and hose to finish it.

I was pretty cranky by the time Cherie came home from work. She looked at me and said “You’re wiped out” and tried to get me to come in out of the sun or at least take a break. I kept plugging away because I hadn’t gotten nearly as much done as I wanted. It was hot and I think I stayed out in the sun too long.


So to the good part. Let me introduce you to Rascal and Trixie. They are Australian sheep dogs. Cherie met the lady who’s dog had the puppies while she was working and she was giving them away for free. We had talked about how it would be good to have some dogs out here so this was a timely thing. So we decided to get two of them, one male and one female, cause they will keep each other company and stand a better chance against coyotes. So we got two puppies. Cherie’s never had a dog but I’ve had several. They are a lot different from the cats she has always had. She said something about shredding up newspaper for the dogs to poop on so I had to explain that unlike cats, who are naturally fastidious, dogs need to be trained for this.

I’m tired. Drank about a hundred glasses of tea to replenish what I sweated out today. Time to call it a night.