Spud Day on the farm

The third week in March has grown into Potato Planting Week here on the farm in East Tennessee, and today was unofficially Spud Day. The first of the seed potatoes went into the ground.

(Unfortunately, all we have is the "after" pictures, none "during." The crew does not always take kindly to having a photographer on the scene while work is being done, and I did not want to risk a work stoppage.)

We put in more than 130 pounds of potatoes -- a few more than 80 pounds in the potato garden, east of the vegetable garden which John operates. Then we put in 50 pounds in the first rows of my part of the vegetable garden. For the record, here's how they went in:

Row 6 (east to west): Yukon Gold; mixture
Row 7: Red Gold; Russian banana (fingerlings)
Row 8: Russian bananas
Row 9: French fingerlings
Row 10: Peanut fingerlings

As usual, we ordered our seed potatoes from Roninger's out in Colorado, and our hopes are high. Roninger's has good products and we have been very satisfied with their service.

The weather for planting today was nearly perfect: dry, cloudy and temps in the mid 50s. We will remember this day when we are harvesting in July.

This is actually been a two-day process to get the garden read (and protected) for planting. Cattle from the field next to ours have been getting through the fences, and they do every spring. Unfortunately, the owner of the cattle figures they will be back, no matter where they wander, and doesn't see his job as keeping the cattle in. Consequently, I have to work to the keep the cattle out.

So, yesterday morning starting with my doing some fence mending. It's just one of the things I've learned to do since we have been on the first. I found a couple of spots where the cattle were getting through and had to string some new lines of barbed wire to discourage them.

This will probably not be the last time I have to go through this process.

But for now, the cattle are on the other side of the fence, the potatoes are in the ground, spring is in the air and all seems to be well.

State of the hives (Easter), and other matters

The bees are flying, anxious for the blooms to open. My friend Jim Brown and I opened the hives yesterday (Sunday, March 23) and found some problems and some good news.

The problems were in the small hive where there were almost no brood cells. That means there is no queen or that she has stopped laying, and that means she has to be replaced. The good news is that there are still a fair number of bees in the hive, and if I can get a new queen in soon, the hive has a chance of being productive this year. I called Coley O'Dell, a premier Blount County beekeeper, and ordered a queen last night. He said he hoped the queens he was ordering would be available April 5.

The good news is that the other hive is strong and ready to go. We found plenty of brood cells in the bottom three boxes of that hive, and the bees were feisty and full of life. They are ready to get to work. With any luck at all, they should be fairly productive this year. The only thing that will slow them down is that they will have to draw out some comb in order to store the honey, which takes extra time and energy away from their honey production. Beekeepers refer to drawn comb as "pure gold," and this is why. Still, there are plenty of bees in the hive, so we should be getting some honey by midsummer.

The farm. Easter cam extraordinarily early this year (the earliest in nearly 100 years, I'm told), and the farm is not yet in full bloom. The day yesterday was a bit chilly and windy, but by noon the air was crisp and the sky clear. All in all, a beautiful day, as the pictures above will validate.

I had the tiller out yesterday, and after we had finished with the bees, I couldn't resist breaking the group. I had marked off a 10 x 25-foot plot just east of the hives where Sally and I will put some day lilies. Those flowers thrive on full sun and neglect, and in that spot they are likely to get both. We bought some lilies during our visit to the Biltmore in Asheville last week, and I picked up some more at a local shop this weekend. We'll see what happens.

Our friend Sam Love promised to show up this week with his plow to give the garden a going over. I have plotted out a space more than twice the size of what we did last year, so the plans are ambitious. But spring is here, and all things are possible.


Opening day. And speaking of spring and all things possible -- life begins again this Sunday, less than one week and counting. My calendar and body clock tell me that the official start of the baseball season is upon us. The beloved Cardinals made changes during the off-season that are exciting and unsettling, and that will be fun to watch. The Yankees have a new manager, and the Red Sox have essentially the same strong team. The Mets are everybody's favorites, as they usually are this time of year, and it will be fun to watch them fail, or not.

My friend George Rable is a Reds fan and as such refuses to speculate or get his hopes up. He is rational and wise.

First Day of 2008

The first day of 2008 was spectacularly clear, crisp and windy. Below is how it looked on the farm.

The Farm in May

I took a little time out yesterday after getting into the beehives once again to take a few pictures for the monthly compilation.

Spring has matured. The crops in the garden are growing, the blooms are off the blackberries and the berries themselves are turning red, and even the honeysuckle is fading. I found one stand of large daisies in the pasture and a few smaller stands here and there.

We've come a long way from March. Check out the video in this entry.

The large field next to ours has been mowed, but Jack Clemmer probably won't get around to mowing ours until next month.

All in all, yesterday was glorious -- sunny, not too hot, a bit of a breeze. Working in the garden yesterday was most comfortable. But, we need rain.

Blackberry blossoms and wildflowers

The farm is entering what I would call its "yellow spring." The pasture is full of yellow buttercups, complemented here and there with groups of white daisies with yellow centers. (The blue bachelor's buttons also add a nice touch.) All the greenery is still new enough to have a yellowish flavor.

The wild blackberry vines are also in bloom. Some of them, as you can see from the photos above, are fairly close to the beehives, and the bees have certainly taken notice. I have been picking the wild blackberries for the last two summers, and each year the crop seems to be more abundant. I have tried to leave area where I know there are vines alone -- not clearing them out or cutting them back. You'll be hearing more about the blackberries as we get into the summer. Right now the bees seem to be having a feast (right).

Sally, Jane and I put out three rows of corn (two yellow and one white) and four rows of beans (two Blue Ribbon and two October) in the garden on Saturday morning. We still plan some pumpkins, tomatoes and one or two other things. We'll see what pops up.

The hives had a busy weekend. Lots of bees were going in and out constantly. They have also taken a couple of jars of feed. I opened both hives last night and found that on the left one (the newer one) the bees still have a tendency to gather under the top cover. They are drawing a good bit of comb up there rather than on the foundations. I'm not sure what to do about that, so I'll have to consult Jim Brown. The other hive is still working away, although there has been more activity in the top box than the lower one. I switched the positions of the boxes, making the top one the lower one, to see if that makes any difference at this point.

Goodbye to winter

After a day and a half of rain and clouds, which turned the air to a late-winter cool, Saturday was a clear, bright and breezy day on the farm. Spring's greens are overtaking the grays and browns of winter; the winter colors never seemed to get much of a grip on things through the season anyway. Now their time has passed.

So, to spring.

I fired up the mower after sticking my finger into the mower and "fixing" a gas leak that had occurred at last use sometime in October, I think. Surprisingly, the thing came alive (after I had fed it a little gas) and actually lurched forward and even cut some of the grass when I lowered the blade.

I decided to push my luck and take off, blade lowered and cutting, into some of the grass on the border between the pasture and the back yard. Cut grass kept spewing out from under the mower as I headed up toward the garden area.

"If this keeps up," I thought, "I could do some real damage today."

And that's just what happened. The mower hummed along, happily cutting all of the grass in its path until it sputtered to a stop, starved for gas. I fed it again, and it started again -- happy like the rest of the garden tools to be working again.

And so was I. Happy to be working again.

I mowed over the entire garden area and bee yard. I call them that with some trepidation but a lot of optimism because there is no garden, and there are no bees. Still, my mowing is the first step toward giving the garden and the bees a chance to exist.

I then tackled the who back yard, which was beginning to look a little rough with the inconsistent growth of early, early spring. By the time I finished, order had been brought to the the grasslands of the back yard and garden.

Sally -- always a sucker for freshly mowed lawn -- even paid compliments.

It was good to be working again.


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After I was done, I wandered around the farm, taking a few pictures of the early spring greenery and blossoms. The PhotoBucket slideshow to the right will give you an idea of what things looked like on Saturday. You can see all of the at the album on PicasaWeb.




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And, in case you're interested, there's a new landscape on First Inning Artworks. I started this one about three or four weeks ago, but I didn't finish it until this weekend. Not sure why it took so long, but it turned out fairly satisfactorily.

Speaking of the farm . . .

Here's a slide show of pictures of the farm I put together last month: