Gone Fishin

Bored kids and a hot summer day are the perfect ingredients for a fishing trip. We drove down to the Conococheague Creek which is less than a mile from our farm and fished for a while.


The kids eventually got tired of fishing so we went to the Potomac River so that the kids could cool off a little.


To get to the river we pass through the C&O Canal National Historical Park in Williamsport, so we took a little side trip along the canal path.


While walking back to the car we spotted these damselflies mating.


All and all an enjoyable afternoon adventure.

Severe Drought

It's official, as of Tuesday we are in severe drought conditions. We are located in Washington County which bridges between Pennsylvania and West Virginia to connect the two western counties to the rest of Maryland.


It is bad across much of the South East with Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee fairing the worst. You can see the drought conditions for the entire country at the US Drought Monitoring website.

Market Garden -- Update #2

Here is how the market garden looked on Saturday. You will notice that the corn is continuing to come in and the sunflowers are also coming up. Unfortunately the Red Nordland potatoes are no where to be found and if you look at the surrounding pasture you can see what a toll the drought is taking on everything.



For comparison here are the photos from July 3^rd



and June 19^th



Best I can remember we haven't had a decent rain since Memorial Day.

First Corn!!!

Nothing like the first sweet corn to make you remember why we are doing all this. Lack of rain has really been depressing and making this entire endeavor more difficult than last year, but the taste of the first corn fresh from our garden makes it all seem worthwhile.


Last night I grilled up some New York strip steaks from Legacy Manor Farm, and some fresh zucchini from our garden and had a delicious local dinner.

Farm Panorama

Above is a panorama of our fields/pastures. Our house is just visible behind and to the left of our barn. Our property runs behind several properties and is nominally in the shape of a L. The barn off in the distance is our neighbors. Our turkeys are in the foreground, the mobile layer coop is near the middle and the pig and goat pens are near the right side beyond the market garden.

We had some friends visit us over the long 4th of July holiday. Tom is a painter and has been doing a series of landscapes "to celebrate the beauty, history and reality of life...". While he and his family were visiting he started doing a landscape of our pastures from this perspective. The painting came out so well that I stole the composition for the above photo. We already told him that we want to buy the painting from him after he uses it in an upcoming exhibition.

Praying Mantis and Praying for Rain

Julia and I were going out to dig some potatoes when we noticed this Praying Mantis on one of our Hostas. I am having fun with the macro function of my digital camera and have been trying to find new things to take close up pictures of.

Unfortunately, the Praying Mantis was the highlight of the outing. I wanted to dig some Yukon Gold potatoes to distribute to our CSA members. We ended up harvesting more than a row of potato plants and did not completely fill up two 2 quart baskets. Last year this same amount of potato plants would have provided us with a trailer full of potatoes, but each plant only had one or two tubers on it.



The severe lack of rain has really taken a toll on our crop production and has been making it difficult to provide enough produce for our CSA members. As my wife and I were discussing over dinner last night, we have our pride and honor wrapped up it meeting our CSA commitments (although part of the CSA model is shared risk) but our financial situation is not affected by the venture. I can only imagine how stressful it would be to have your entire livelihood held hostage by the whims of the weather.

Market Garden -- Update #1

Here is the first of my promised market garden updates. The corn is doing surprisingly well given the little rain. The first planting has tasseled out and the other three plantings are all going strong. We have our first beans in with our corn and will likely need to start harvesting them this week. We have already harvested some zucchini and there are numerous yellow squash coming along. The yukon gold and fingerling potatoes are continuing to do well, but I am still waiting for the red nordlands that I re-planted to pop. I am hopeful that they will soon, otherwise we will have a diminished potato harvest this year. On Sunday I dug two more of the floundering rows from the upper plot. While the potatoes are still tasty, their yield leaves much to be desired.

De-Predation

One of my jobs on the farm is keeping predators from harming our livestock and crops. I have a fairly broad definition of predator -- cotton tail rabbit eating our strawberry plants is a predator -- and generally don't mind the job. To date I have taken care of a number of rabbits, one skunk, and one groundhog (or whistle pig). Must mention that I am not positive about the groundhog since he got away, but I am pretty sure I got him with the .22 rifle.

Last night I was feeding the peeps -- 20 some chickens and 8 Chinese geese -- that are brooding in a stall in the barn. The geese had been getting out of the small plastic pool that we were keeping them in so I decided to pull it out to let them run about the stall just like the chickens. Well, I pull the pool away from the wall and I am greeted by a rather large black snake. As I find out later, he was in the middle of making a meal out of one of our Delaware peeps, and based on our count already had helped himself to another sometime earlier. To most people this wouldn't be a big deal, as I mentioned I am in charge of killing on the farm, but I am irrationally afraid of snakes. Just thinking about them gives me the heebie jeebies, but I was mad and this snake was eating my chickens, so I grabbed a shovel and dispatched the snake. I went inside to get the kids before I tossed the snake in the hedgerow since they get mad at me if I don't let them see the carnage. The first thing my 7 year old son says is, "Dad you conquered your fear, I am so proud of you!" To say there was something of a role reversal is an understatement. Sam took this picture of me with the snake on the end of the shovel.