Green Meadows farm

Today we visited Green Meadows farm. We went with Nate's sister and her 2 kids. We had a good time catching ducks (like this one) and chickens, and petting pigs and cows and bison and sheep, and all kinds of stuff. It's the perfect time of year to go, since it's cool enough out and not as many people are attending, due to the time of year. Green Meadows is a petting farm, not really a working farm as such, nevertheless, still fun to go and visit. The ducks, nor the chickens, were too keen on being caught and held, but I managed to catch one of each for the kids to hold. The girl did great with them, the boy seemed scared and unsure. Quite different than what I was expecting. Still, they had a good time. 

summer harvest is over

yep, all the tomatoes we had are done growing, the watermelons have died off, the corn was eaten by something but us, and our basil is on its way back. (I ate a lot of that. good stuff!) so now we are going to till up the beds we have left and get ready for planting our fall harvest. We'll keep one box for herbs, Nate has his beans growing, and we are going to make some covers for the boxes as the kittens have been having fun wreaking havoc in the garden beds, so we are trying to come up with a way to keep them out of there, as opposed to keeping them in the house all day.

this is a mouse from months ago. the rat she caught was twice the size of this rodent. 

speaking of being in the house, we came home today to a dead rat in the living room. yeah. kinda yucky since it was missing half of its head. that we found down the hall. At least they are helping keep the yard rodent free. fierce kittens we have.

sorry looking corn

I don't know what happened to the corn, but it looks pretty sorry. I'm not sure if it's the heat, the soil, or bugs, or a combination of all 3, but they didn't even come close. Nate is sorely disappointed. He was looking forward to corn, as he likes it so much. I take consolation in the fact that we got so many tomatoes.

I keep telling him it's our first garden, and we really did plant too late in the season, so we should be happy with what we got. I'm excited about the fall vegetables! I'm not used to having a garden in the fall. In Ohio, by now, the plants have gone through their life cycle and we are preparing to till up the garden to put it to bed for the winter.

we have a watermelon!

I could hardly believe it when Nate showed it to me! The weather has been unbearably HOT (feels like 102F today) and most things are withering brown and dying. I was wondering how a watermelon would grow on a vine, but it is! I am so ecstatic! I am hoping this one comes to fruition so we can have some for later this year. Watermelons take a LONG time to grow, and this is a baby one. We'll keep an eye on it to see how it progresses. 

Our tomatoes are growing really well. Almost everyday we have at least a few yellow pear tomatoes and one big red tomato.

even the hanging tomato planter is producing! 

queen of the dirt

queen of the dirt

This is a photo from our last visit to the landfill for compost. Since Nate has an extended cab on his truck, the bed was shorter. We both shoveled and I got on top of the pile of dirt and packed it down. It's very loose dirt otherwise and would have blown all over on our drive back home. Plus this way we brought back a lot more dirt than if we had just shoveled. This free compost has turned out to be great for our garden, and saves us quite a few bucks too.

here's what we started with...

We started the day after Earth Day this year with just 2 garden boxes. I thought that was all we were going to start with and try, since this is our first time growing a garden. Our local landfill has free compost, so we shoveled a bunch in the back of Nate's truck and used it for garden soil. So far, it has proven to be very good. Nate added some vermiculite to it, which seems to help also. I've used the free compost for years in my yard in starting new plants. Can't beat free! The cats were very curious as to what we were doing, and Scotty helped dig up some of the weeds. Actually, he made himself a nice, soft, cool dirt spot to lay in while were were getting rid of weeds and grass to make room for the boxes. I like to say he helped, as he did dig out some weeds. I just don't think he knew what was going on.

Next to the 2 boxes is our compost bin. We have since moved it to make room for the other boxes. We have another rotating compost bin that we are in the process of putting together. The one we currently have is ok. I guess it's just not composting as fast as I would like it. We do have quite a lot of worms in the current compost box, which I am happy about. They are some pretty big suckers too! Nate says we should grow worms and sell them. That's another idea for another day. We'll get around to it.