Here are a few pictures of what is growing this year.
This is a view of the sweet potatoes on the left, cucumbers in the center, and melons further out. The melon patch has four 95’ rows of Georgia Rattlesnake, four rows of Hale’s Best Jumbo cantaloupe, and one row of Hubbard squash on the far right. The sweet potatoes are all Georgia Jets planted a foot apart in mounded rows 3’ apart, with wood chips in between to help keep the weeds down. All the cucumbers are national pickling this year. We plan on keeping a lot of seed, and then growing other varieties too next year.
Looking awesome. Being in the city I’ll never have that kind of space to devote to melons and other space hogs. Have you tried trellising your cucumbers to increase productivity?
I sent them up a slanted 6 foot chain link fence panel a few years ago, but picking was a hassle, and they would sometimes grow inside the fence.
I prefer letting them run over the ground, because I just roll the vines up like a carpet when I pick. That to me is the easiest ever, because the cucumbers hang in easy reach on the underside of the roll. I get a five gallon bucket or so a day once they get going. It’s more then I need.
The chips help a lot with the weeds. The melons are planted on long raised rows, so the chips are about a foot deep in the open areas between rows.
Most areas, like around the cucumbers, or the paths, the chips are 4-6" deep.
There are a lot of us, and we all put our time in pulling. The worst area to keep up with this year has been the tree nursery. There are no chips out there, and the weeds got out of hand a couple times.
This is a Gala apple that we bridge grafted last year. The tree is doing very well! Some limbs are tied up to keep them out of our steer’s reach. Those are tasting pretty good already, and are starting to color up.
The peach orchard in kinda in the center of the property, so there is a buffer of sorts.
Yes, we do have squirrels. We also have six Jagd terriers, and six sons with bb guns, pellet rifles, and 22’s. Let’s just say our place is not a very welcome environment for rodents. I have a 7 year old that keeps mouse traps set in this old house, and there is usually a pet somewhere happy to snack on what he catches.
Our boys used to even go off our place on the ranch land next door and hunt packrats with our old pit bull. That was high times for young boys, and they would bring home bags of packrats. They still hunt out there, but now it’s rabbits to feed the dogs.
Country life is sure different. Our kids have never watched t.v. but they have a ton of skills.
I kind of did that this year, I put in National Pickling, County Fair, and Little Leaf as picklers. We’ve been overrun with them, and the most productive for me by a long shot has been National Pickler. On the slicers I planted Marketmore, Straight Eight, Green Dragon, Garden Sweet Burpless. We like Marketmore for production and taste, but Green Dragon has been neck and neck in terms of production.
Your fruit trees look awesome! Can’t begin to imagine having to tend 90 or so trees… I just have 9 bush cherries, 3 cherry trees, 8 peach trees, 14 apple trees, and a few honeyberries to tend, and I do a poor job of getting to them. (especially when garden season comes around - and heck my garden is a fraction of yours too…)
Nice set-up - and kudos to you, it just has to be a sun-up to sundown deal right about now around your place
Looks very nice! I can tell you have a well oiled machine of a farm. I know you all work very hard to keep it that way. I like how all the boys have guns down to mousing with the youngest. Everyone is helping.
I really like those quaint wooden fences around each tree! Very artistic. Mighty different look to my chicken wire fencing that I used when some of my trees were young and the deer kept eating the lower fruit/branches.
We are close to removing the wood fences. We never intended for them to be permanent.
They did a great job of keeping the sheep off the trees when they were small, but now they are more of a hindrance, as they give the sheep something to jump up on to reach low limbs. Only a few are really bad about it, and some of them are leaving.
What we use now to facilitate more intense grazing, and rotation of pasture is electro net fencing. It will be easier to graze the whole area, maintain the area inside the cages, and keep the sheep off the trees without the wood fences.
We are going to recycle the material into a short fence, ten feet off another fence, to protect our cherry bushes we are planting down a property line.
We have over a hundred dwarf sour cherries (Carmine Jewel, Romeo and Juliet) we are going to plant as a (hopefully) food producing privacy hedge.
The plan is to have all we can use, and we do have a big family. I canned over 50 gallons of apples one year, and it only took us a year to eat them. With some of our children only a few years away from families of their own, it’s hard to say how much we will be able to use.
We will certainly sell if we find we have a surplus.
(And it is hard to imaging not having a surplus with a ton or few of cherries!)
Hubby was talking about planting Wichita Blue Spruce down that property line, but we both decided food producing bushes are superior in every way.
