Sun. Rain maybe later

Rototilled the middle bit between the garden and orchard, about 20x50 feet. Sod, rocks and knapweed, on a slope. Only lost the tiller down the hill once, and it boobled along and finally fell over and died. Nothing was damaged.

C. came over wearing her magic apron and produced tape to hold the throttle lock up, which is a big improvement. Damn thing kept sticking wide open, and I had to let go of the handlebar with my left hand and pluck at the lock on the right handlebar while the tiller heaved and throbbed at the soil. That's how it got loose and ran downhill.

So now we rake the grass, roots and rocks out, then till again. That's my setup for raking, above. I pull the sod up onto the screen, then sit down, rub the dirt through the screen and toss the quack roots into a bucket.

Tomato Alley, before mulching. We gave the plants a whole lot more room this year, thinking they will produce more if not crowded. It goes against the grain, though. Those black bags are duck bedding mulch from A.

Finished Tomato Alley with 13 more plants (Balconoyya, Stupeechka, and two from home-saved seed,  identified only as "perfect" and "nice medium") for a total of 38. (Yes, our record keeping is a little weak.) We have probably 50 more tomato plants in need of a bed.

C. planted cucumbers, shallots and squash.

The guineas are grounded, for crimes against cabbage. They can come out when the cabbage is big enough to defend itself.

Good day. Worked hard. Sleep now.

Rain, then sun

We've got 25 tomato plants in the ground: Prudens Purples, Opalkas and San Marzanos. There is probably room for another 15 in the row, then we'll have to make a new tomato alley. Rototiller time. Lo.

I go out, dig seven holes, stir in alpaca poo, pinch the lower branches off each plant, poke it in a hole, cover and water. Then I go in and rest and cool off. Seven is the most I can do. Eight is right out.

Early morning thunderstorm

And it was a doozy! Lightning blasted, right out our big windows, over the Little Spokane River in the valley below. Thunder baboomed. Four dogs climbed shivering and panting into my lap. And the rain cut loose in a wild windy rush. The worst of it was over in about 20 minutes, and the dogs stretched, shook themselves and wandered off.

This morning the garden was nicely wet – but too wet to rototill or plant tomatoes. So I'm laying soaker hoses out in the garden beds, and making more by poking poly pipe with an awl. I've got odds and ends of all different sizes of pipe and fittings from estate sales over the years, and am working to integrate it all into a working system. It's slower than buying everything new and compatible, but a whole lot cheaper. It's the hippie way. Probably have to pick up some more fittings to connect everything.

I'm finding the USU PVC plan to be a little unsatisfactory. They don't glue the pipes together so they can disassemble it all at the end of the season – but the damn things tend to come apart under water pressure. It's probably that our garden is on a slope, or maybe I'm not strong enough to cram the pipes into the fittings hard enough, but it's really unpleasant (or maybe comical) to be fiddling with soaker hose at the top of the garden and have the pipe pop apart to spew water at the bottom. I rush to the bottom and fit the pipe back together, and it pops loose up top. And I've staked the line with rebar and buried sections under the path and you'd think that would be enough. Feh. So I'm glueing some sections together, as well as any place that wants to come loose. Storage be damned.

Anyway, a lovely overcast day, great for working outside.

Weather change

Em and Richard were up yesterday, and we engaged in a great deal of rock moving, carting off the rock piles C. made when expanding garden beds, and adding to the terrace walls. They got Richard's ancestral tiller going, and I plan to fire it up tomorrow, maybe, and carve out a couple of new beds, extending the garden onto the orchard side.

C. made cream of asparagus soup. Delicious with homemade rolls full of fresh oregano and thyme.

Today started out hot (yes, we slept in) and C. planted and mulched a big square bed of Cocoa Noir beans, and a double row of rattlesnake pole beans on the tall wire trellis. I repaired a bunch of garden hoses, and found some more soaker hoses and hooked them up. Made a couple of tree cages for the apple trees and the Siberian tree shrubs. A. and Q. came up with a load of duck bedding for garden mulch, and took a load of stuff to the dump. Awesome on both counts!

The sky clouded up and a cool breeze started, with occasional thunder sounding in the distance. C. went to finish brushing Pants the goat, and I went along to hold him. I wore a mask but will probably be all stuffed up for a week like last time, but he fusses and fidgets and it goes much faster with a helper. (Yes, I took one for the team.) Then I donned the haz-mat suit and applied bug powder to Pants and the sheep in the barn as rain came pouring down, banging on the tin roof.

Asparagus soup and new rolls for dinner. The dogs had rice with frozen pod peas from last year's garden and chunks of cheese. Pretty good day.

Goat as chiropractor

So I had my ass kicked by a 60-pound goat. Nothing new there.

We'd caught Pants and C. was brushing the cashmere off him. I stayed away as goat dander makes my head swell to tremendous size. And after an eternity of brushing, C. decided to give up for the day. I "helped" her by unclipping him BEFORE taking the halter off his horned head, and he tore away, still wearing the halter. My bad.

He's leary now, harder to catch. I go over to the big red maple tree by the barn, pull down a branch and rustle tasty leaves at him. He eyes me with his creepy horizontal pupils. I try to look innocent, and babble happily, falsely at the sheep and the remaining goat, feeding them handfuls of leaves. He is suspicious. (Can't imagine why.) Finally, watching those dumb sheep suck down those succulent leaves becomes too much. He comes close, halter now around his neck like a leash, and scarfs lovely red leaves – I grab the halter with my left hand, still holding the branch with my right. Right then I know it's not going to go well.

He takes off and my feet go up and I hang on tight to branch and goat, spinning counterclockwise like one of those aerial rope dancers – only faster and with less grace. (I feel like a spinning top or a dreidel…the spinning don't stop when you leave the cradle…) I'm not sure how many times we go round, at least twice, before I go flying off into the dirt. Oof.

I haul myself up, surprisingly unhurt. In fact… my back feels a little better. I have a few minor scrapes is all. I limp into the house and bring out the big guns: alfalfa pellets. Pants comes over politely, eats pellets and lets me remove the harness. Guess I showed him.

May garden

C.  planted bright lights swiss chard, and replanted a lettuce patch that Earl had dug up. And she watered a bunch of stuff with the hose as we haven't got the soaker hoses set up yet.

Last night she planted shallots, and a patch of spuds in the orchard area.

I grubbed out a bit of sod at the north end of the garden after work, laboring (slowly!) to extend the beds into the orchard. We've tried rototilling the sod but that just chops the quack-grass roots up, and every stinking chunk starts a whole new plant. Still, digging the grass out by hand is going to take us old people a thousand years. It might be worth rototilling and planting now, and pulling little quack weeds up for a year or two or six.

We've got a bed set aside for tomatoes (but not all of them!) and for a double row of green beans (but not all of them!) but then we're going to need more space. I'm not sure how this happens, except it has something to do with someone with a dad and granddad named Gardiner.

Extra day off

Graduation is over, and my summer hours have officially begun. I'll have Mondays off until September. I couldn't take yesterday, though, as my buddy Tom and I had to produce two life-size cardboard figures of the college founder in silly costumes for a dinner. I did enjoy sitting with them on the back of the golf cart as we delivered them to the HUB.

So I took today off, and boobled around the garden. The winter squash seeds C. started didn't come up, so I started a few more and stowed them in the greenhouse. It's getting late for them, but maybe fall will be easy and they'll have a chance to mature. Transplanted a couple of tomatoes still under the lights in the house. Worked on the garden watering system. It stops just short of the last two beds, but I think I'll call it good for this year. Below, one line runs through the asparagus bed. I've drilled tiny holes in the pipe, so it sprays out and up. You can kind of see the spray. It's my custom asparagus fountain.

It's all three-quarter-inch PVC as our water pressure isn't very high and I wanted to make sure the lines would carry enough water, even at the ends of runs. It is not beautiful, but if it works, that's enough for me. Hose-dragging is no fun. Basically, the line runs from the top of the garden down along the central path. There's a valve and hookup for a soaker hose on each bed to the south (left in the photo), and every two beds on the north side. The lines to the north are buried where they cross the path. We've spent probably $120 on new pipe and fittings, and the rest will have to be scrounged. We have a bunch of soaker hoses I'll get out, and will probably have to fabricate more of the fountain lines from some black poly pipe we have. 

Mo the goat went to the vet in the back of the Subaru. Some nasty goat lice moved in on him in the last couple of weeks, and he's had a bad reaction to them. His skin is all lumpy and crusty and sore looking. He got an antibiotic shot and a sprinkling of some hideously toxic pesticide powder. We'll have to sprinkle the other big animals as well, weekly for a month. Gah. If we'd caught it earlier, or if he hadn't been sensitive to them, we probably could have found a less drastic treatment.

C. spent the afternoon battling big rocks at the top of the garden. She's got half a dozen out of the hole, but there are a still few wedged in the bottom. She's saving those for tomorrow.

Otra the chicken has gone all broody, and has been faithfully setting on an empty nest for about a week.
We don't have a rooster, so she's unlikely to hatch anything chicken-like. But my egg lady, Charlene, grabbed a dozen big fertile eggs right from under her chickens' butts yesterday and put them in with my usual order, and I hustled them home and poked half of them under Ms. Cranky Pants. She pecked me a few times, then fled, bitching furiously. She continued to bitch as she shoveled in millet seed in the chicken yard. "Squap!" she said, with her mouth full. Peck-peck. "Bock squap!" Peck-peck-peck. She spent a few minutes eating, then was back on nest duty. Chicks would be fun, and Charlene has a wide variety of breeds – Aracaunas with neck beards, Polish birds with chrysanthemums on their heads, all kinds. We could use more hens, but not more than one rooster. But it's way to early to be counting them.

Here's Otra in the posh nest she built in the pet-crate nesting box.

And here's what sunrise looks like out our back door.