First thing this morning, got my plane ticket online for going out to CA at the end of the month (niece Annie's graduating from high school, and haven't seen my family for some years).
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Bought 4 trees - 2 Macoun apples, 1 Cortland apple, 1 Summer Beaut Nectarine -- all dwarfs.
The Macoun and Cortland are both excellent for eating fresh and for cooking and canning. The Macoun is additionally supposed to be good for drying, and the Cortland as a winter storage apple. The Summer Beaut is said to be good both fresh and canned. No fruit for a few years of course, but something to look forward to... meantime, I have my eye on a wild apple tree up toward Beldingville Rd.... might be able to do some harvesting there this year ;)
The existing fruit tree (Marian thinks it's a peach, but I'm wondering if it's a plum...) is doing a little better this year, and will fare even better when the black walnut near it is taken down -- which will happen after the first haying later this summer. It seems to have had at least a little fruit, as there were a couple of baby trees nearby that looked related. L rescued them from being mowed, and we'll plant one in a safer place to see what it looks like as it gets older.
Also got strawberries -- I forget the name of the variety but it's an early/mid season berry and supposed to be good for northern climates.
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Stopped in at Awen Tree a half hour after it was supposed to have opened but no one was there. L has a doctor's appt. later this week, so we'll try again then.
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Then off to Webs, where we ran into
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islenskr and
countessinn -- not completely unexpected, but nice that we ended up being there at the same time. Picked up some Icelandic sock yarn from a local producer, Maggie's Farm. L got 2 skeins of cream/tan-colored yarn from them and I got one off-white and one black.
Nothing appealed to us in the outdoor tent this time, but we found some more sock yarn in back that we liked, and some more Shetland for weaving, in flecked shades of warm-yet-slatey-blues. The latter had been 13.99 and discountable, but had been marked down to $15/cone, which was even better, since each cone weighs around 2 lbs. or so.
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Then back up to Ashfield to see if there were any plants left at the 1st Congo's plant sale -- there were, but nothing I was interested in. At some point I may pick up some herbs from the hardware store though, to add to the collection.
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Mary and Peggy, two of the people who helped at lot during sugaring season, were working on their garden plot at the farm. William had done a bit more planting himself. I dug most of the walking trench I needed next to where the strawberries will be going -- the trench is sort of a combination of creating a raised bed and being a small water catchment system, like a mini-swale. Once everything's in it'll all be covered in hay chaff, trenches and all. Took a break to get some ibuprofen for the shoulder/arm and get some water, then came out and did some more digging. L had some things to do here and there, but dug a hole for one of the apple trees by where the big fir used to be -- had to get an ax to chop the old roots out of the space. I dug a hole for a second tree, and William created a bit of chaos by coming up to till some parts of the garden again -- he ended up re-doing our long stretch for the oats and flax because in his efforts to work on where he's going to plant corn he compressed some of the long stretch. It's been interesting figuring out who's doing what this year....
Oh, plus he decided he doesn't want to grow squash this year so, if I haven't killed some of the seedlings by forgetting about them this week, I should have some extras to go in other people's gardens.
L is determined to start sowing oats tomorrow. I'll be putting in the strawberries and hopefully some seeds. And maybe some squash and pumpkins too. I need to put in as much as I can as quickly as possible now, so I know if we need to put anything in the side garden. Hopefully not, so that we can let
etainmbw and her mom Patricia use the space. At worst though, I think I'll only need to put the green and wax beans down there.
But of course, we need to put the rest of the trees in as well, so we'll see how far we get. At the moment, I'm happy to be doing nothing of note....
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