June 2011 at the Farm

The summer is going by so fast. I am trying to catch the blog up to present time and it's already a struggle to remember what we did in June. Mostly I think we weeded. But we also carpeted the garden.

This is how it looked when we first started. The plants were so tiny you could barely see them. The carpet was free -- taken from a huge van full that all got soaked and they were giving it away. Joseph's Coat of Many Colors, I called it and for the first few weeks the wind blew it around. Eventually it got heavy enough so it just stayed. And it really cut down on the weeding. As it was, the weeding was very intense. My brother-in-law and I spent a half an hour on our knees trying to pick out the swiss chard seedlings from the crab grass.

By the end of June the garden looked like this. The corn was (forgive me) as high as an elephant's eye, the tomatoes were, no lie, well over 6 feet tall, and the winter squash, seen in the center of this photo, was taking over the world. That's Dolly standing in the background. Named by a neighbor, she watches over the garden rain or shine.
At first the cucumbers came in with a vengeance. And believe me, we tried everything. My sister came up with recipe after recipe but as it turns out, there are only so many cucumbers you can eat in a week. We fed them to the calves down the road, we threw some out, we tried to give them away but no one wanted them. The road side signs went from "Cucumbers, 4 for $1" to "Cucumbers, 10 for $1" to "Cucumbers, Free." At the end of June we had visitors, my husband's sister and her husband. We had exactly one fresh tomato from the garden. We held it aloft, a perfect ruby, gleaming in the sun. By God, we had grown a tomato and it was perfect and red and round and tasted like heaven. We were farmers after all.