The tree finally fell

We thought the locust tree would finish falling when the predicted thunderstorms came through Saturday evening. So Alan took the fencing down from around the garden in the area where we expected the tree to fall.  Except, we never got the predicted thunderstorms. But the tree did finally fall down Monday morning, after a gentle rain. And we were close to predicting where it would fall, only off by about 8 feet.  It landed on my ready to be dug potatoes instead of the squash plants.
Now its time to clean up the mess.

Next step, dig up the potatoes, then put the fence back up! The adolescent turkeys are eying the garden!

Agricultural Vinegar

Agricultural Vinegar is 20% vinegar used for killing weeds.
We have been slacking on the new house maintenance and were in need of some weed killing on our patio.

It took some doing to finally get the vinegar, but within 8 hours of spraying, our patio now looks like this:

I'm sold!

Mid July garden update

The weather has been just about perfect for the garden, and the weeds.  My first attempt ever of growing corn seems to be going well.

Not quite as tall as an "elephant's eye" but above my waist.  I was worried about the corn in the field behind the house across the street pollinating my corn, but it is tassling now and should be pollinating way before my corn.  I am growing popcorn and a bantam corn.  I wouldn't have included corn in my garden but I want to make tamales and I want to know where my corn husks came from, and corn apparently has a place in crop rotation.  According to Eliot Coleman, potatoes do well in soil that grew corn the year before.  So we'll see next year how the potatoes do there.

Garlic is another thing I have never tried growing before.  I will definitely be planting more this fall.  It was super easy and the cloves look great.

The hard neck garlic has bigger cloves than the soft neck so I think I will plant more of the hard neck.

The squashes are enjoying all the hot weather with a regular rainfall.  The Boston Marrow has really taken off and I am looking forward to trying that squash for pumpkin pie.

The spaghetti squash is also doing well.

The tomatoes have been hit or miss.  They don't like to be close to the walnut trees.  The plants farther away are doing much better.  Hopefully, I will have enough paste tomatoes to can.

When we were looking at houses one important consideration was firewood.  Well, we don't need to worry about firewood here.  It just seems to come to us.  In the past month we have had at least 5 trees fall down, the majority of which are black locusts.  According to the internet, black locust is second only to hickory in BTUs and it makes little ash.  I don't think we will need to worry about firewood for a long time, as long as the game land keeps sending us trees,
Unfortunately, there is a very tall black locust leaning towards my garden.  I am hoping it will wait till everything is harvested before falling.  Some other large branches came down onto my black raspberries just as they were ready for picking.

Yes, there are raspberries under there.
This is a picture of the big locust leaning towards the garden.

Looks like when it finally falls we will be fixing fencing on both sides of the garden.