The past two days on the farm have been a lot of hard work! With summer vegetable season ending, many of the beds are being put to rest for the winter, which means pulling everything out of the bed and mulching the bed. After taking care of the chicken coop (it went much better this time), we worked on the sweet corn bed yesterday:
Clearing this bed meant taking out all the corn stalks, which required a bit of digging around the roots to get them out, as well as all the green weeds that had grown up in the bed. Between the two of us (I’m so much slower than the owner), it took us about an hour and half to clear that bed:
We’ll weed it once more before mulching it for winter.
After that, it was on to the tomatoes. The tomato plants are situated in a big, flat, fenced-in area underneath some massive old apple trees. The area was badly overgrown since the plants went in, so you could barely see where the beds were under all the overgrowth. All the tomato plants needed to be pulled out. This required some care on account of the stinging nettle that was everywhere. Half of pulling up the tomato plants meant weeding out the stinging nettle just so I could safely reach them! The nettle still got me, but I put up a fight. And, of course, the tomato plants were tied up to the fence and needed to be untied. After an hour and a half of pulling up the tomato plants yesterday, I can honestly say I have a deep and abiding disdain for anyone who ties up tomato plants like they’re trying to prevent a prison break. They’re tomato plants – they’re not going anywhere! The ties were no higher than calf-height, which meant standing hunched over to undo any that hadn’t been tied in a simple slipknot or bow. Three hours of clearing the corn bed and the tomato plants and my back was ready for a break!
Besides clearing out the tomato plants, one bed needed to be cleared out entirely and returned to open “lawn,” and the entire area mowed and cleared out of some pretty big lamb’s quarter and weeds that had grown up, which I spent several hours today working on. I had some visitors while I was out there:
These are the neighbor’s sheep and goats I wrote about briefly before (notice the billy goat on the left in the back getting on that tree). I heard the sound of stampeding hooves behind me and there they were. I know they can be quite destructive, but I like having them nearby. Have you ever heard a sheep cough before? It sounds like a human being. It’s weird. All the property in this photo belongs to my host, but she lets the sheep graze the uncultivated land. They seem to like the apples and the stinging nettles. Notice the guy on the left of the picture sticking his head through the fence to get at the stinging nettle. The trees on the far left and right of the photo are apple trees, and you can see the apples all over the ground. I had to clear a bunch of them out of the fenced area before I could mow today.
The weather has been so fantastic the last few days and it’s made working in the garden a very pleasant way to spend one’s time. It’s really starting to get chilly at nights, though. I will have to invest in some warmer clothing if I’m going to stay much longer.
In other news, the seeds I sowed are all sprouting!
Even the Mizuna I sowed, then plucked out, then resowed and covered with the clay-y local dirt instead of the bed soil:
I also sowed some radishes that are coming up nicely – I’ll have to update with a photo later.
Two new volunteers showed up yesterday. A couple of guys from Israel. They’ve been hitchhiking through Europe and managed to get to a remote farm in southwestern Hungary from Vienna in a single day. There’s a French guy coming tomorrow, as well. So much for my solitude! That’s okay – it does me good adjusting to living with other people.
TL;DR: Farm work is hard, but the visible and tangible results are pretty rewarding.
