Another hot, frustrating day.

Got the zinnias planted yesterday so that makes it ok though. Two small sprinklers are running on them right now.

This morning things got off to a great start here at the old farm, lots of water running, 3 mama wild turkeys with their 5 chicks clucking under the biggest apple tree in our orchard. The chicks are too big to be threatened by the cats and they can fly real good but I still keep an eye on Sparky so he doesn't disturb them anymore than possible.

Frustration started when I got to farm #2. Got the water running there good but then when I went to remove sprinkler heads from one line of handline to convert over to the "big gun" sprinkler I had a heck of a time getting the sprinklers out or the plugs back in. Dang if I wasn't trying to change over the line my brother had been using, which has never had the heads removed before. So before I ruined anything else I gave up the job for later. By that time the gasket on our new silt filter had blown out. So I had to disassemble that and accidentally tore the filter big while I was doing so. Found out the fertilizer I put in there had plugged the secondary spin filters which caused the pressure to build up and blow the gasket. Arg! from here on out I'll put the fertilizer in a sock so that it doesn't float loose and get into the secondary filters.

It was getting plenty hot by then, about 90 in the field so I came back to the old farm and moved water and did some other chores here. 95 degrees by the time I got in. So I indulged myself with about an hour nap after which my sister showed up to borrow the tractor so they could mow their pasture and boarders. Glad we got all the planting done so they could reduce some fire danger without crossing purposes.

Just got through eating some of mom's delicious homemade pizza and a beer (gasp! yes I do occasionally have a beer, but almost never two; I know my limit!) and will go shut off water at farm #2 shortly, when I'm legal. 16 ounces of beer= 1 hour until I can drive.

Hope you are all having a lovely day with lots of freedoms and entertaining pursuits.

Cool Weather, no blog

The last couple days have been about 82 degrees so we have been scrambling to do just as much as possible while we can leverage the coolness. Might actually almost catch up on the weeding. Pretty much all we did today was weed control except for some work on the big filter for the drip tape.

Watermelon have reached football size, corn is beginning to silk and the third field is beginning to tassle. We planted the last planting of corn yesterday, Finally! Hoorah! The only thing left now is the last planting of zinnias and maybe transplant some zinnia plants I have leftover to the ends of some corn rows for decoration. Will try hard to start getting a few pics up, alhtough I'm not highly motivated because the weeds make stuff so ugly. But all my neighbors and passerbys keep telling me how great it looks, so maybe it's just me.

Gotta go out tonight and spray for beetles on the pumpkins, I think. Either that or the last planting of cantaloupe and watermelon.

Hope life is treating you to popsicles and butterflies.

Happy Birthday America!

God bless this land of liberty and all her people who struggle every day to make the whole world a better place for every man, woman and child lucky enough to be alive on earth today.

96.4

But the wind at farm #2 made it much more comfortable than that. Up here on the hill the air is pretty still and the ground is light colored from drying out thus being between earth and sky is like standing in an oven.

The piggy pig bastards at the top of the irrigation ditch are hogging all the water for their lawns and useless (as in not even being used) pastures today. The fact of the matter is that they are just selfish sh!ts who have some hallucination about cooling off their part of the world by running as many sprinklers as they can. The stupid ditch walker put us on a rotation wherein the rich a$$holes further up the ditch get 4 days out of 7 while we and the rest of the unfortunates at the end only get 3. What passes for his reasoning was that when the people at the top weren't using the water on those 4 days some would be left over for us. But this seldom happens, instead people at the top steal water from us on our 3 days anyways and then the ditch is almost always completely dry during their 4 days. This old farm is so sad when the ditch is empty. Like a dusty old child's swing with one broken rope. Grants Pass Irrigation District, get your stuff together! Or die and get it over with.

Fortunately at farm #2 both of our landlords (2 parcels there) give us access to almost totally unlimited water. Charley and Pete, you rock! The cantaloupe over there
have reached the size of softballs, the watermelons are as big as eggs. The corn is tasselling and the first silk is showing up. Tomatoes are as big as golfballs. With the beginning of harvest still about 4-6 weeks off this shines well for a bumper crop.

Wishing you all a delightful day (except for the Byers and other a-holes at the top of my ditch!)

Power and Innocence

Can't have 'em both. A thought provoking article at TCS Daily: When Superman Shrugs

Hot Hot, Busy Busy

Spent this morning and early noon time working with dad and bro at our friend Terry Spencer's house putting down some turf. Terry's dad and son-in-law were there too and we had a fine time laughing and working. But bro set the pace so we worked pretty hard and fast. The lawn looked super when we finished but we were about 200 square feet short so we didn't quite get the total gratification of a job well done but we did do a job well. Terry was going to get some more rolls of turf to finish with when we left for home. With such a little bit to do he didn't need our help to do the last bit. It was a nice break from farming although the melons and the weeds in the corn weighed heavy on my mind all morning.

Tomorrow we will be spraying, fertilizing and prepping the last fields for corn and flowers. Zinnias mostly. And of course some more weeding in the early corn fields. Whew! This heat always reduces my enthusiasm for this line of work but the first taste of melon always restores it. Only three weeks (about) until we start picking corn! Now that is a big source of enthusiasm.

Hoping your day is fine and free.

Irrigation aggravation

The stupid neighbor woman from the bottom of the hill just came up to clean the filter on her intake. Dumb woman! the filter was clean this morning when I walked the ditch and all she succeeded in doing was dumping about a ton of muck and debris into my pump and irrigation system. The reason she has problems with her irrigation is 1) her system is really old, 20+ years and 2) they leave it open all winter long for frogs and insects to nest in and for leaves and other debris to clog. So instead of solving her own problems right off the bat early in the year she'll just play at fixing it all year long and cause me a world of headache twice a week. Dumb woman!

And to add insult to injury she trespasses and blocks my driveway. Some people are just alive because it's illegal to kill 'em. You'd think she was stupid enough to remove herself from the gene pool, but apparently luck is inheritable.

To spite my frustrations I'll wish you a lovely day.

Busy

It was 105.7 monday and 99 yesterday. A few hours off in the hottest part of the day saved my life.

Finally getting the last of the tomatoes tied up. Will also plant 2nd to the last field of corn today. And if there's time put down fertilizer again. Weeds are getting out of hand in a couple of corn fields but somehow we'll muddle through.

Strange dream last night, I dreamt about 2 theatres, both 2 stories tall with an "old west" fashion, lap board painted white (flaking paint) the theatres were on opposite sides of a side street facing the main thoroughfare. The looked almost identical and offered almost exactly the same movies. I was supposed to meet my lady friend there but some other people showed up and distracted me away into some nearby buildings.

Hope your day is cool and pleasant.

103 messing with me

Degrees that is, hot and humid. But my plants seem to be loving it. Especially the melons and tomatoes. Lost some late planted lettuce though.

Here in the dark, quite basement of an old farm house (circa 1943) we can pretend that outside all is fine and dandy. But step out for a minute and the heat closes around you like a fist around a mosquito.

I spent a good part of this afternoon sleeping. Yeeha! did that feel good. Even had a few flickering fluorescences of dreamery, but nothing memorable. It will be several hours still until temp comes down enough to work. Then I'll be shovelling dirt and tamping posts for tieing the tomato wires to. We use a method that we call "controlled sprawl" which isn't quite as good as caging each tomato plant individually but keeps 95 percent of the plants off the ground. Makes for good fertilization and easy picking too.

This heat is super for the corn, especially the warm humid nights. Our first field should be ready about the 20th of July. Probably have corn and squash as our only crops to open with. Tomatoes won't be ready until August 10 or so.

Wishing you a comfy day despite whatever weather you are having.

My birthday, the happiest day of the year

I just found out that my birthday was the happiest day of 2006. Check it out here.

Mandatory daily entry

Saturday June 24th, 2006
Hot. 100+
Sun very intense. Sizzling feeling on skin even with sunscreen on.
Did much watering, some spraying today.
Trapped between earth and sky like a piece of metal between hammer and anvil. Heat reflecting off the hard clay soil.
I gave an extra little drink to the baby watermelons and cants.

Birthday and corn planting

It's been just a lovely day, if a tad hot in 90+ degrees. As I was planting corn today the spray from the spirnklers would occasionally blow over and deliver a cooling burst. But the corn really loves this heat so I don't mind so much. As a matter of fact just about everything in the fields is loving this stuff. Cantaloupe have set on the first fat little fuzzy fruit, almost the size of a dime. No flowers in the watermelon yet, the males will show in another week or two and the females about a week after that. Tomatoes have also set fruit, some nearing the size of a cherry (except the cherry tomatoes which have just started to flower) Peppers are setting on a few early fruit and eggplants have started flowering. The first male zucchini flowers have already fallen off and a few more are about to open.

Wishing you all as lovely a day as I had a birthday.

Here we go again, Again!

"US sky regulator clips wings of Los Angeles police drone"
In this article we read about the LA police using a tiny, basically almost a toy remote controlled plane to remotely view surface roads and neighborhoods with 2 wireless cameras. A superbly great idea which any fifteen year old with a little lawn mowing money could pull off. And for the 15 year old it would be, if not totally legal, at least no big deal.

But damn those policeman for trying to fight crime without kissing every ass between earth and the heaven of regulatory masturbators. Argh! This sort of thing infuriates me. Some jackass at the FAA actually had to go and make a big issue out of what should just be common sense. How many times a year do the thousands of already in service RC airplanes cause mid-air collisions? I can't recall a single incident.

And of course the privacy tweaks had to weigh in on it too. Like any of us are going to be arrested for having a barbecue in our backyards. This device and those who use it purely intend towards crime control. No one would bother to use it for invasion of privacy.

As long as our society is so susceptible to such inane and inherently self-serving influences we will never see the peace-of-mind which we all know hovers just out of reach.

Howdy, New Jersey

Hey diddle, diddle, to Monmouth Junction. Interesting to note there is also a Monmouth, Oregon. I've only been there once but it was nice. What's it like in NJ ?

Religion and Science

Here is a great article about how religion and science go hand-in-hand.

Super summer to all

In the northern hemisphere anyways. Love you Aussies, so happy winter to you.

I'm so delighted with this season; it is impossible for me to work a longer day today than I did yesterday.

Today the nieces were a great help. They pulled weeds in the melons and tomatoes all morning, something which had been concerning me deeply. Dad and I finished putting down fetilizer through the next field of corn. Only need to put down about a ton more for the last few fields and then in a couple weeks we'll switch to sulfate of ammonia for the earlier plantings.

Tomorrow we'll plant white corn again. Not a new crop for us but one we don't usually bother with. Yellow is just better. But we had so many snobs ask for it last year that we will be providing it this year at a substantially higher price ;-) I just can't wait to hear the howls of indignation from the spoiled "want-ers".

Hoping life is giving you lots of lemons for your lemonade.

13 hours until solstice

Well, about that long anyways. Getting lots of final details done but some things are going to come in under the wire. Zinnias for instance. Sunflowers we got in last week and gladiolas (finally!) today but the zinnias might be another day or two. I have some plants I could put in but I haven't got a good place for them yet. Plus temps are getting too high for tranplanting. It is just about time for me to get a couple pics of the farms to put up.

Great news! Both of my youngest nieces (one from sis, one from bro) will be coming to help work tomorrow! Finally get the cantaloupe, watermelon and tomato fields weeded. Plus it is so nice to have an excuse to hang out with them.

We also planted our third or fourth to the last corn field today.

Oh, and fair warning, the big 4 zero happens to me this Friday so if I don't post or am particularly grumpy that day, don't be surprised.

Hope happiness and wonder stop by for to visit with you.

Zea-centric thinking

Even as I type this, as you read this, nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium are being carried by water to the roots of many corn plants. Tomorrow they will start to use these elements to build new chloroplasts. The plants will slowly turn a darker green over the next few days. Their growth will increase dramatically.

That is why dad and I are tired. We spent the day putting down many hundreds and hundreds of pounds of fertilizer. The corn plants will not question this sudden improvement in their fortunes nor will they thank us. They will ruthlessly use this abundance for their own purpose just as I will ruthlessly harvest most if not all their cobs for the delight of my customers.

The tomatoes, cantaloupe and watermelon are also growing very well. I've been using some of my more refined secrets to really push them along and they are about to roll off the green polymulch mounds in which they are planted like a tsunami played back in ultra slow motion. With so many things working in their favor this year the fruit should be particularly sweet, colorful and full of flavor.

Hoping your day is equally so.

Happy Father's day

To any of you lucky dad sorts. Me and my dad are heading over to my bro's in a few minutes to let the dogs out (bro is away at a softball tournament for his daughter, what a dad...)

Today was another long day of back aching work. Planting more cukes, driving stakes for the tomatoes which are growing so fast that I'm getting really stressed about getting all of them staked in time. Sundry other chores like moving water etc.

One interesting dream last night. Was visiting my old pal Bill Lumen and we went out back of his house (which is actually forested) and he showed me this long, huge two story factory type building which he said I was free to use. That was pretty much it. No idea what catagory to squeeze that into.

Hope you all had a great Father's day.

Summer breeze

Another long day of hard work.
While setting water this evening I was forced to move with the breeze. It set my mind to flowing even as it struggled with my irrigation. The light of the nearly setting sun was faintly chiffon and the breeze was warm from the southwest. 22 years ago on this day four teenagers named Alice, Guy, Steve and Trina were driving towards the drive-in theatre in a van going to see Ghostbusters. The sky was clear and the air was warm and freedom tasted so sweet.

I spent a good part of today soil surfing on one of our old cultivators. Dad and I had to laugh that it still worked so well after all these years. We had almost forgotten this piece of equipment but it cut down weeds like an old champion. I wish I'd had my PDA with me to record the sound it made because it was a pretty cool combination of steel, rock and earth sounds. Balancing precariously on that bouncing, rattling steel monster is pretty tiring though.

I'll be going out shortly for one last task in the dark, gotta shut off the water we set earlier. This time of year the world begins to take on an unusual quality for me as my cycles and rhythm and algorithms are broken up by necessity. Some afternoons are so hot I have to stay inside and sleep in the middle of the day and then water needs to be controlled late into the night and very early some mornings. Then some days are so critical in work that I can't stop no matter how hot it gets. My routines disintegrate and stresses build which leave me exhausted and exhilarated.

Soon the solstice will come. The great turning point wherein power and potential exceeds the limits of possibility and the cycle of being turns on a celestial dime. Only a few weeks after that point and all propositions become mute. If the job isn't done it won't get done because the crop won't make in time to do any good after that. Getting "laid by" is mostly just a nice idea for me since even when I'm done planting a raft of other jobs like weed control and intensive irrigation will gobble up my every waking hour.

Wishing you a joyful moment of freedom.