A Garden Plan

Sunday evening: Adam is plotting out his scheme for the pasture this fall. He's marked off the rectangle (about 110 feet square, or about 1/4 acre) for his wheat field. He hopes to get it tilled in the next two weeks, and plant wheat there by the end of September.

He also hopes for a winter garden, a long strip 6 feet by about 30 feet. In it he'll plant lettuces, spinach, broccoli, bok choy, chard. We hope to have these winter crops to sell at the local farmers' market during months when there is little available that's fresh and local.

In the spring a much larger vegetable garden is planned. Adam is enthusiastic about eating primarily veggies and little meat. We've already been doing this for a year or two. We love a vegetable medley roasted on high heat -- potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, and sweet potato fries, with little tomatoes added at the last minute. Serve this with a dip of mayonnaise and peppery dijon mustard, like a brown Inglenook mustard.

It's one thing to have a plan for farming; it's quite another to accomplish it. But Adam is enthusiastic and motivated. He's been wanting, even longing, to do this for quite a few years.

He has five healthy bee hives now. We lost two small nuc boxes in the spring/summer that did not survive, and we lost the one Warre hive in the move. He's been feeding the bees honey-flavored sugar water for the past several days, and they are sucking it down! He wants to add a box on top of each hive for the ladies to stock with new comb and honey, before winter comes.

Monday morning: I went out to the pasture to take a pic or two of Adam scything the wheat field, but this is what I found:

Not my husband withe a scythe swinging through the air, slicing the grass down, but the rumbly, puttery noise of a lawn mower. :(
He tried the scythe, but the grass (which was rough cut last week with a bush hog) was too short for a scythe. A lawn mower was the other option. You can tell we haven't been farmers! We don't have all the machines in the shed, all the options.

This morning he had this strip of the wheat field done, which is about the same size as the winter garden will be (in another location) later.

The mower is sitting in the corner of this season's wheat field, and the field is a bit bigger than the width of this photo indicates. Next year, the vegetable garden will be much bigger and include this wheat field (and about as much more again), and the new wheat field will be past this field, further down to those tall pine trees on the right.