Fertilizing, planting and transplanting

It has been one busy hot day today around here. It started with some errands this morning. My buddy Gene that had a stroke on April 1st was in need of a haircut and the same lady is the one that cuts my hair. I picked her up this morning and we went to see Gene for a bit and we both got a hair cut. That was a good start to the day. Got her home and came back to help Jason transplant tomatoes and plant beans in the garden. He already had 5 rows of pink eye purple hulls planted by time I got home. We got started on the tomatoes and all those are in. I had 4 rows about 50 plus feet long of those. If we dont get rain tonight we Rodger and I will finish planting the rest of the beans and such tomorrow. Although it was really hot today the tomatoes hardly wilted.
                                                        (tomatoes after they were transplanted)

The peas are blooming, the mustard turnip greens are ready to can, thas a project for next week. The potatoes we planted are not coming up like they should, the onions do look great, the lettuce is ready to eat, the carrots and beets are doing good as well.


                                                    (the rest of the garden)

                                                         (the volunteer potatoes)

As for potatoes, we planted taters last year and the bugs ate the vines up. The potatoes were not worth digging. So this spring they were turned under with the rest of the garden. The volunteers came up and are about a foot tall already. So when Jason ran the tiller in the garden getting it ready to plant everything else he plowed thru the taters and made them into rows. They will get fertilizer a lil later and we will see what they do. If these make good taters, this is the way we will plant them from now on, or should I say let them come up volunteer. We shall see.

                                                                (orchard beyond the garden)

The trees in the orchard all have leaves on them and seem to be doing ok. We have been keeping the grass around the trees mowed  with the riding mower and letting the rest go to seed. There is a really nice stand of grass on the orchard area. It is located on the end of the river bottom east of the garden. And we do need to mow again real soon as some of the grass is waist high.

                                                         (Jason side dressing corn)

The one acre field of corn that we planted for cornmeal is up and it was time to side dress it. They found out that the corn planter and the cultivator are set for different width rows. So the tractor cultivators can not be used to plow the corn. It will have to be plowed with the rototiller. So with not using the cultivator we had to figure out a way to side dress the corn with fertilizer without doing it by hand. Rodger and Jason rigged the side dresser on the 4 wheeler so we could use it. It worked like a charm. It was bolted to the rack on the back of the 4 wheeler and when Jason would take off down the corn row he would trip the machine to let the fertilizer flow out the tube that was attached to the hitch on the 4 wheeler. It did a better job than we could have done by hand.

                                                        (adding 100 lbs fertilizer to machine)

                                            (the little chute drops the fertilize near the plants)

The fertilizer gets dropped right beside the corn in the row so there is no waste and you dont fertilize the weeds and grass. We used 19-19-19 fertilizer and the usual amount is about 400 lb per acre. The flow rate on the side dresser was set for about that much. That was so easy and now we are thinking we will likely use this method to side dress all the garden as well. It sure saves my arm and back from doing it by hand and you are done in a third of the time. It only took about 2 hours to do an acre of corn. And that was a lot of smoke breaks.
While Jason did that I was in the garden getting the weeds out of the strawberries and some other stuff. It was really too hot in the middle of the day for me to be doing that. I think I got a little bit too hot. I got really weak and felt kinda odd. So I came on to the house and had about 3 big glasses of water. I got my self a little bit dehydrated. Or maybe I am getting a little too old to do this stuff in the heat of the day any more.
So till next time, blessings from the McGuire homestead.

Stella