Busy, Busy, Busy

We have been very, very busy the past few weeks. Eugene has been ripping out old plants , tilling the ground where they were and replanting with new crops. Monday he removed several beds of peas and pea fencing, tilled and planted potatoes. I have been harvesting and selling raspberries. I am a slave to the raspberries at the moment. I spend around 3 to 5 hours daily harvesting the things. It's an interesting job as there is a wonderful ecosystem living in the berry bushes. I see many kinds of spiders, Daddy long legs (harvestmen), wheel bugs, pirate bugs all preying on the stink bugs, aphids, worms laid by some sort of moth, japanese Beetles etc.. The birds have surprisingly, not done a lot of damage to the raspberries, maybe because there are so many that even if they are eating a lot I am not noticing it.

Along with harvesting raspberries we are also picking kale (except the dinosaur kale that has pretty much died-We think because it has been too wet), broccoli, peas (which take almost as much time to pick as the raspberries), turnips, rutabagas, basil, parsley, cucumbers, zucchini, onions, garlic, scallions and a few strawberries.

On top of all that the rain has lead to many weeds so someone has to hoe and pull weeds. Eugene has been doing the bulk of that work though I pull weeds when I harvest out of beds that have a weed problem.

And if all that work is not enough we have to market the crops. We have markets 6 days a week right now though I am thinking of closing the store either on Wednesday or Sunday (even though we do good sales on both of those days) just so we have an extra day to get stuff done in the garden and also off the farm as we have errands to run just like everyone else and lately it has been difficult to schedule trips to the bank, grocery, post office (they don't deliver out here). the good news is even though we are insanely busy business has been excellent so at least we are getting minimum wage for our efforts (in the past were doing well to make $2.50 an hour-farming has not been a well paying profession since the 1920's)

I will be happy when work slacks off a bit. if you don't see any new entries to this blog for a while this is why.