the little wild kingdom

continued weeding, trying to get the last bean gardens i planted weeded before it gets harder later. i'm almost done with one half and about a third done with the other half. no, i'm not doing the math beyond that... :) alas it's been getting hot and humid really early so i'm only getting in part days of effort. it's ok, the absolute worst gardens are looking better so now i can spot weed and work on what needs it the most next.

still plenty more to do.
 
we picked and dealt with almost all of the peppers yesterday. whatever we weren't going to use for stuffed green peppers we gave to my brother to take with him and he'll pass them along or eat them. we also sent him off with some baked stuffed peppers too.

after four rounds of baking yesterday we have one pan left to bake this morning and we're done until the next round of peppers ripens on the plants (4 weeks or so).

i have plenty of Beaver Dam peppers on the plants to ripen yet and i'll be saving seeds from as many of them as i can as they were popular seeds at the seed swap last spring. :)

otherwise today is back to weeding since it didn't rain last night - i should be able to get an hour or three in before it gets too hot outside. as usual this time of the year it is pretty humid and a heavy dewfall last night. i don't really like weeding in the early morning because everything is so wet, but i'll be able to do it ok this morning with some gloves on and making sure to change the shoes before getting out of the garden.

first though, i have a few dishes to wash from last night and then off to the garden...
 
i was hoping i was done with groundhog hunting but one was out there today and i managed to get the gun back out, the patio door open and the screen door open without putting it on alert and so it turned away and i was able to line up a shot and take my time instead of having to rush it and hope to get lucky. so the poor creature did not suffer.

now i need to pile more weeds in the hole that a creature uses quite often to see if it is disturbed or not. if not, then at last maybe i've gotten the culprit and if so then there's yet another around... which is possible. so far i've not kept exact count but 6 - 8 groundhogs have already been buried and this one will get buried tomorrow morning.

two days ago i mentioned that i've not seen too many critters running around. since i said that we've seen a squirrel, a chipmunk, a few rabbits and now the groundhog, so deer will probably wander through tonight and the kitties and raccoons will round things off.
 
A groundhog can devour a garden in no time! Mainly, if they decide to "move in" those burrows are horrid! There are several a long the retired RR track adjacent to my farm. Off & on I've found a few trying to move in here 🤬. Once animal removed, I usually dig their dens with the backhoe to refill all. An animal stepping in a hole can break a leg! Yeah, a concern. 🥴
 
several hours of rain so far this morning and several more to go by the looks of it. so i didn't get the poor critter buried or anything else done outside this morning or likely today until later and whatever i do later will likely also be a mess, but i really need to get that groundhog buried...
 
mowing today so i get to see the mess the guy made mowing the south field. i'm hoping it won't be as bad as it looked... not much of a breeze and going to be in the low 80sF.

breakfast is down the hatch and it's time to get going...
 
finished up weeding the horseshoe garden (getting it back to bare dirt at last) as it was full of crab grasses, purslane, spurge and other grasses. the area where the dill was growing was nice in comparison so we're going to see if that will work for all of it. i'll weed it either way but i sure don't want to go through what i just finished again. it's much easier and takes less time if i can scrape it. it did not get scraped this year on time because Mom kept saying she was going to do it and then she didn't and by the time i looked at it again it was too late and Mom said again she was going to deal with it, but again she didn't sooooo... i did.

the neighboring thyme is not doing very well at the moment, taken over by clovers, grasses and trefoil. it used to look so nice, but mowing it has really not been as good for it as it should. the mower was set too low for this most recent round too and it looks not very nice as compared to how it should look. so we need to back off on the mower and get it watered and i'll gradually get it back into shape again with some weeding and not mowing it again and let it recover and fill in again. this subsoil clay is brutal to try to get large crab grasses out of it. the sprawling kinds that reroot as they spread out... miserable with a dull shovel and hard work on the hands with a large knife.

tomorrow i'll level it out a bit with the cultivator and spread some of the dill seeds around and then water it all a bit. 1 hr max and then move on to finishing up the bean patch which is loaded with purslane that is going to be dropping billions of seeds all too soon, if i'm lucky i can get it done in two more days (four shifts). weather forecast is looking to be near perfect for a change (cool, breezy and not so humid).

today was a beautiful day out there. i had my sweatband on but did not wear a hat so this evening i noticed my head felt a bit warm from probably getting too much sun. not a severe burn but enough to remind me to get the hat back on tomorrow...

after the 2nd round today i came in and had dinner and then fell asleep so i woke up in time to go to bed, did a few dishes and am wide awake with the night owls, but will settle in for another round of sleep now. tomorrow will again be a busy day. possibly have visitors and i can rest and flap my gums for a while if that happens around lunch.
 
finally finished weeding the last big garden i planted outside the fence. that was the one that was just getting ready to drop a lot of purslane seeds all over (a few plants were already starting to drop some). that headed off a few billion seeds from falling and making those gardens a lot worse.

tomorrow i need to go through the tomato patch, get it weeded and find any that are ready to pick or have BER and then water everything. i saw a few tomatoes that had chew marks on them so i'm hoping it was from the groundhog i already hunted - i didn't see any recent chews, but i didn't look at everything yet.

weeding the rest of the gardens inside the fence i'll get back to this week in a few spots that i didn't have time to finish last week and the week before. maybe in a few weeks i'll be caught up weeding just in time for harvest season. :)

it feels good to finally be getting things back in shape. it was really looking pretty crazy out there.
 
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