Not many more days like yesterday left in the year. When I have grain to pickup and co-op delivery to make I combine them into one trip but that means I can't leave until later to be at the co-op at opening. Once the garden has frozen and I have no more deliveries I can go get grain at my normal early time again.
I got to the Steam Plant and had 3 barrels to pickup but had 3 empties still to drop so I lashed one empty on the trailer to even out the load then headed over to drop the empties.
I dropped the empties and slid the one barrel into the back of the truck and strapped down the 2 on the trailer. Traffic was such that I didn't get a shot of dropping the empties at Saranac.
Nicely I got a pallet off to the side to drop my orders on while the apple farm unloaded their pallets of boxes of apples in the bay door. One of the few times I was not the first to the co-op.
As soon as I pulled into the farm I backed into the sheep pen and dumped the two barrels from the trailer. The sheep and alpaca have had so much grain in the past week they just stood and watched without much interest.
I got my post done finally after the two hour trip to town then headed out to pick in the gardens. The squash are still plugging along thanks to the warmer temps we are having. 18.5 pounds for the day and today I want to start busting open seed squash.
I picked the tomatoes and cucumbers together and by the time I was done had 9 pounds of tomatoes and 34 cucumbers. That is over 1200 cucumbers picked since July 22 and 155% over last year with more still on the plants.
The boys wanted to go with so after picking them up from school and stopping at the house we headed up to the melon garden. I called it good and picked everything up there save 2 squash. There are a lot of green melons still but most all the plants were trashed and I have had the water off for over a week.
As I picked all the melons I pulled the plants and piled them towards the end.
These are the last of the melons for the year, plus a couple others.
20 lbs Minnesota Midgets
29 lb Tigger
11.5 lbs HOneydew
36 lbs Pear melon
a few corn
3.75 lb acorn squash
This all made for a total for the day of 176 pounds picked. If things hold I should easily surpass 4000 pounds harvested this year, last year was 5083 pounds. I'd say pretty good for losing a month of the growing season from the rain.
I left the garden like this and this morning I will go up and toss all the plants into the truck to haul down for the sheep then I will fold my plastic and roll the irrigation for the winter. I have one more year for sure it looks like before she will likely be selling the property so I want to make next year a really good one. I plan to haul grain up this winter and spread it out to till in next year which will help a lot.
In the lower garden near the creek I had one squash plant come up in an entire row, a delicata. I had seen they were looking good and it was time to pick the majority of them. 19 weigh 31.5 pounds and there are another 4 or 5 growing. I am going to give half to my mom and we will keep the other half. Her row of potatoes are doing quite nicely and are about ready to dig.
Another early night and my stupid knee keeps tweaking in the afternoons/evenings. I need to work on the inflammation as I have been working my ass off this year and beating my body up pretty good.
Today I am winterizing the melon garden, I think my bird feed will be in which is good as they are all thinking they are starving, I have to wash clothes as I didn't yesterday, and the farm has to be prepped for rain tonight into tomorrow.
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