The Weekly Digs #67

Last Saturday brought a sunny dry day and we were able to plant the rest of the tomatoes. In addition to the tomatoes we planted four 100 foot rows of sweet corn.

 Since the rows are 30 inches wide, we could fit two seeds across. We planted 1600 corn seeds by hand. It was very monotonous and my legs were aching afterwards from squatting as I planted. We may need to make a seeder or purchase one soon to make the job less tedious and long.

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We will have 800 stalks of corn after thinning everything down. We started with 6 inches apart and will thin to 12 inches. 

This amount of corn will hopefully fulfill our year’s supply! In year’s past we have planted corn very minimally because it takes up so much space in a small garden. Since we weren’t buying vegetables from the store and only using our garden for the veggies we ate, we went without corn for much of the year.

Before we left the farm garden, we covered the tomato rows with a layer of composted mulch. Everything was looking good!

Then earlier this week brought lots of thunderstorms and some flooding. It rained every day. On Thursday Cam was meeting our well drilling guy up at the land and he told me we needed to get on facetime because something was happening to the tomatoes. 

I knew it was a bad sign. The first tomato he showed me had snapped and I thought it was from the recent storms. The next few though were definitely damaged from animals. Something had dug down to the tomato roots and ate them. 

If you are a southerner you probably know from my explanation what animal it was- an armadillo! They love roots. Ugh. 

So we lost at least 10 tomatoes to armadillos. I haven’t been up to see it in person yet. After last week’s rain fiasco, we stayed home during the rainy days this week!

Luckily I started a batch of 60 new tomato seedlings a few weeks ago because I didn’t feel like we had enough paste tomatoes for preserving and we had already lost some to disease. 

Even though I was so disappointed to have to toss about 30 diseased tomatoes this year, it is turning out to be a huge blessing because now I have plenty of replacement tomatoes.

Obviously, we put the cart before the horse and should have definitely put up a fence first. It just didn’t work out because it is late in the year and I felt like getting my huge tomatoes in the ground was more important. 

The past few days we have tried to map out how we want the fence and what kind of fencing to use. We are putting up fencing today and I’ll let you know how it works out next week. 

Everything is looking good at our home garden because we are here to monitor it 🙂 We are getting lots of strawberries now. Earlier this week we were harvesting about a pound per day and yesterday we must have picked at least 3-4 pounds. 

Not a single one made it to my freezer or dehydrator. I’m not sure if any will get preserved at the rate we are eating them. 

At the farm garden:

• Planted 1600 seeds of Who Gets Kissed Sweet Corn
• Planted great white, brandywine, black krim, cherokee purple, sunrise bumblebee, san marzano lungo II, black cherry, and blue beech tomatoes

At the home garden:

• Harvesting strawberries, raspberries, nanking cherries, asparagus, lettuce, radishes, green onions, dill, cilantro, and sorrel. 
• Planted more zinnias around the perimeter of the garden. 

In the kitchen:

• I did manage to make two half pints of strawberry rhubarb jam. I didn’t can them because it was such a small amount I figured it would get eaten soon enough. They were consumed by my family in less than 24 hours.