Sunday, 7/15/07

Strawberry Beds: Over the past few days we've managed to get the new slab border installed on both the strawberry beds. In the photo above, the job is finished on the nearest bed only. The strawberry beds have always had wooden borders, but those had pretty much rotted away. The new border doesn't really look like much, but it should hold the dirt in the bed for a while. It also gives us a place to anchor the wire tunnels we use to help keep the critters out of the beds. Installing the slabs didn't require too much time and effort. I did have to use a Skil saw to put a more or less straight edge on one side of some of the boards, though.

Mowing: I also got the garden mowed since that photo was taken. Our recent rains have kept the grass growing and prevented me from mowing it.

Okra: We had our first fried okra of the season for supper last night. It was good, and there's plenty more on the way.

Sunday, 7/15/07

Wednesday, 7/4/07

Tomatoes: The first tomatoes of the 2007 gardening season are almost ripe. These are a variety of cherry tomato.

Blackberries: Jo decided that today was the day to venture up to our pasture and pick blackberries. We'd been picking a few ripe berries off the plants closer to the house for a few days now. She figured she ought to be able to easily get a couple of quarts from the numerous berry vines that are taking over -- along with honey locust -- what used to be our upper pasture.

Dressing appropriately for berry picking is important. Jo couldn't take on the chiggers, ticks, snakes and berry vine thorns in the shorts and sandals she normally wears around our place during the summer. Instead, she donned tennis shoes, tall socks, long pants tucked into the socks and her green bean picking "gloves". Jo also applied some commercial insect repellent and took along a stick for fending off the snakes. All that garb plus a couple of plastic buckets made for quite a sight. I wanted to take a photo, but feared strangulation by camera strap if I tried, so the berry picking expedition went undocumented.

Jo didn't end up spending much time berry picking. She returned with a couple of dozen blackberries, about a zillion stick-tights of various types clinging to her shoes, socks and pants legs and five tick that were still crawling around looking for a nice, juicy home. It seems the birds and critters had beaten us to the blackberries up on the pasture.

Mowing: I've been doing some mowing and stockpiling the grass clippings so that we can use them to mulch the two corn beds when we remove the wire tunnels. It just isn't worth the effort to remove the wire, mulch and then replace the tunnels. All those grass clipping ought to be in pretty rank condition by the time we get around to using them, though.

Wednesday, 7/4/07