Farmer Ed

We want to advertise that our produce will be Fresh from the field... If you want we can pick it while you wait.  If its practical, we will pick and deliver.

Folks will get to see what 1600 tomato plants look like.  We will be putting 210 new plants in the field weekly up into August.  The tomatoes we  are planting only produce tomatoes for a couple of weeks and then you replant them.

We picked up a swarm of bees on Sunday off of the side of our church...  bet they were religious

Since heirloom tomatoes aren't very vigorous  growers and lack disease resistance, its beneficial to graft them onto a hybrid tomato which is a vigorous grower and disease resistant...  We are grafting Brandywine tomatoes unto Maxifort rootstock

Making a vertical cut in the Maxifort rootstock... the cut is about 1/6 of an inch.

Notice I havn't cut myselft yet!  I expect before its all said and done, I'll will be blood brothers with the tomato family. 

 

cutting the Brandywine trunk into a wedge that will fit into the cleft in the Maxifort rootstock

slipping the Brandywine rootstock into Maxifort

clipping the union to keep it steady until healed

After grafting we put them into a container that has water in the bottom to keep the humidity high until the plants can provide for themselves

Bee gathering pollen from red bud tree... look at the bee's back legs in these photos as they gather pollen.  The back legs are the bees wheelbarrows

Apple tree blooms.

 

Notice all the pollen.

 

Put down most of this plastic in a couple of hours last night in a field South of Crescent...  The plan is for this to be a FarmerEd show garden

Folks have problems getting seedless watermelons to germinate because they require higher temps than seeded melons.  The flats you see below were planted Sunday and the only difference is some flats were closer to the barrel woodstove.   We had seedless watermelons germinating and visible by Thursday (4 days).  Heating with wood dehumidifies the greenhouse and keeps mildews and diseases down.

   

 

This year a majority of our tomatoes will be determinate kind.  In the coming months we will be starting more flats weekly.

I am sure they are starting to build up their hive numbers now.  We filled up the feeder times today for them

Ben is on the white horse Dolly she knows he is a youngster and is very careful with him... I don't think she would trott with him on even if he kicked her

Bought the scope stuff from this site http://www.tickbitesupply.com/mos.html 

 Scope is a long eye relief type... left the bayonet on the rifle for a little extra weight since this is the carbine model of the Nagent it bucks a little