Crop report...gardening and fishing?

That's right, here it is, early this morning- well between 8 am and 9:30 am, Garry and I took some crop photos while driving to and back from Salone, where we went to buy some petunias to plant in his flower bed... and maybe some tomato and pepper plants for the garden since it has gotten so warm now.

Since church starts in the village at 10 am we had time in the morning and Garry thought it might be too late to go buy them after church was over at noon.

We did buy peppers and tomato plants, Garry paid for 10 and 20 plants, although when he planted them with the help of some of the boys this afternoon, there were 17 and 23, I think he said. We ended up with three small rose bushes and no petunias, a new rake for the garden, a package of zucchini seeds and two cucumber plants Garry wanted ( I pointed out I had planted a row of cucumber seeds the day before) and one eggplant for me, even though I KNOW THE POTATO BUGS WILL EAT IT, like every year I try planting them. Oh and a cabbage to eat, well to make salad with possibly for tomorrow, since we are hosting a student/staff picnic at 11 am for May first- which is the big beginning of spring holiday, like May 24  for Canadians or Memorial Day for Americans.

That's why I am up at 11 pm, boiling potatoes for salad. Good thing I checked the pot on the stove, they are cooling off now.

Anyway, here are your crop photos for this week. In the photo above, can you see the darker green wheat field? That far one to the left is our field as viewed from the road from the village to the highway.
Here's a closeup. It is several inches taller and thicker than the other fields of wheat nearby.

Garry says you can see the damage caused by the freezing temperatures we had ten days ago when we had the snowstorm.

 Looks like they will need to cultivate the field across the highway again before planting sunflowers. All that green in the alfalfa field they plowed up last fall is the alfalfa still trying to grow back even though they cultivated the field this spring. Alfalfa has deep roots and it is a perennial, so now it's a weed in this field!

The real alfalfa fields should be ready to harvest in two weeks, it is about a foot tall now. They will cut some this week, either as hay or greenchopped to feed the cows right away.

The big alfalfa field

a very long pole

 As we checked out the alfalfa field we went around by the village ponds and saw a number of people camping and/or fishing. It is the holiday weekend after all.

These guys came by bicycle

Garry talked to Max's father-in-law who we passed fishing on our side of the pond, he said they weren't biting.

OK, it's midnight and the potatoes are cut up in the fridge.








Since it was just 9:17, Garry had time to check on the corn before changing for church. Of course there is no corn up yet, but that does not keep him from checking on it by digging up some kernels to see how they are doing.

It took a little while to find one, because he had the guys use the harrow on the fields, he was worried the corn wouldn't be able to poke through the ground. The snow melting made the ground wet and the heat is making the soil turn into a very hard crust more than a inch thick. The harrow breaks up the top layer, but does not reach the seeds.

The problem was the harrowing made the rows that had been planted disappear, so it was hard to find one.

So while he was digging in a couple places in the field, I took some pics- one of some guys near the pond in the village untangling a big fishing net and one of a cow staked out (between the field and the "new barn" there is a grassy area) and a lady carrying bags of grass she'd cut.

He found one!

The root is growing

 Of course once he found it, he had to replant it.

 Then we headed home so he could shower before church. It was a little difficult to follow without a translator, but we can find the scripture passages and read along in English, and one of the hymns we sang today we recognized as Blessed Assurance. Max arrived back from his trip to Turkey before the service was over, it seemed like they had a great time.

After lunch Garry went to the new barn to breed some cows and I planted the rose bushes; then Garry rototillered the rest of the garden and planted two rows of sweet corn seed and his plants.