Before the rain.......

Last weekend we awoke to the sound of drizzle on the roof, the cow pea seed showed up first thing in the morning and all our focus was to get it in the ground before it became too wet to get the tractor on. But first we had to attend the Annual General Meeting for the fire brigade in which I am secretary (of all the days!) anyways the rain held off and I survived the meeting.


Got home about lunchtime but no time to sit still as the clouds were getting darker so with sandwiches in hand and eating on the run we managed to get the cow pea planted just before the heavens opened up. (Luck of the Irish!) Why plant cow pea? The cow pea was planted in the area intended for next years garlic crop and will be ploughed in as a green manure crop thus enriching the soil naturally. We ended up receiving 68ml of rain that weekend. Woohoo!

Garlic crop approximately six weeks from harvesting.

This weekend with more rain predicted our aim was to get the potato crop mulched. Since being planted it has been hilled up by hand 4 times and we haven't had to water it as yet. Its been nearly five weeks since they were planted. Don't they look great! At this point in time we believe the crop yeild will be better than expected and may even have some to sell. Know anyone who may want fresh organically grown potatoes?



Here you can see the boys hard at it, putting the mulch on. The green tinge on the left is the young crop of cow pea. Behind that is the garlic crop. Grow my little darlings, grow.

All our family are pretty handy with the old pitch fork and we have one each. The formed beds on the right are intended for sweet potato and corn which we will grow for seed. Beyond that you maybe able to make out our milking does happily grazing.

The caulifower in the garden is almost ready for picking, yum love raw caulifower but the aim is to stock the freezer. Speaking of stocking the freezer we did over a wether and now have lovely chevron in the freezer. The mulberries are outdoing themselves so my next venture will be to make mulberry pie, wish me luck!