Thursday, June 4, 2009

Killdeer Tennant


We have a renter, or maybe we are the renters. I went out to the farm early this morning to do a little tilling in the cool part of the day. As I was tilling Carol's melon patch, I heard a screeching. I looked over and saw a killdeer on her nest, yelling at me to go away. The picture on the right shows her nest, with 4 eggs, and the picture on the left shows her hobbling away, faking a broken wing with the hope that I (the predator) would go after her and leave her nest alone. I gave her nest a wide berth as I finished my tilling. After all, she was probably here first.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

¡¡¡Dry!!!

The water table on Ebey Island has dropped at least 6 inches in the past few days. It's amazing. A month ago I was slogging around in my high boots in the mud and today everything is quite dry. The shallow wells we dug to get some water for the young seedlings are now almost dry. The water table is about 2 feet down. The soil is still moist down about 3 inches, so established plants are getting plenty of water. However, everything planted on the raised beds are quite dry.

The official temperature in Everett is 93.1 degrees F. Here where I live near the Port Gardner Bay is in the mid '70's. This summer is starting out hot.

I planted the last of the corn today. We now have about 400 linear feet of sweet corn. This evening, if it cools off, I will go back and plant the last of the bush beans. We'll end up with about 200 linear feet of bush beans. That's a lot of corn and beans to get us through the winter. Of course, we'll also have potatoes, onions, squash, broccoli and brussel sprouts. This month I will start lots of broccoli seedlings for fall planting everywhere that anything else didn't grow.