Weekend at the Farm July 6 - 8, 2013

I was surprised to see this flower blooming this weekend.  I dug up this plant out of the yard on Nixon Lake Road.  I would have never guessed it was a spider plant!  I assumed it was an amaryllis of some sort.  Great surprise!

• Went up on Friday evening and stayed through Monday.  Nice long time.  Beth came with us, she is still recovering from her knee replacement surgery.
• On the way home from work Friday evening I noticed the wild grapes along a particular part of Fairbanks North Houston were purple.  The grape vines are growing along a barbed wire fence, so they were well within reach.  I pulled my car into the drive of the old deserted house where I dug up the crinums a couple of months ago.  I saw an old bucket in the yard, so I grabbed it.  As I was dumping out the muck that was inside, I thought how lucky I was that ten wasps didn't fly out of it.  I walked along that extremely busy street over to the grape vine and picked a bucket full of the grapes. 
• On Sunday I made grape jelly.  In the picture below I am just bringing the juice to the boil.

• On Sunday I also harvested my honey.  The drought has created a sparse situation for honey.  Most of the frames had no comb at all.  But I took what I could.  I pulled out 6 frames from the super, and I harvested the honey from only those six. It made twelve 8 oz jars of honey plus a little extra.  Our neighbor came over and helped us which sped up the process a bit.  The hive is infested with small hive beetles.  I will have to get that under control right away.  

•  I worked in the Orchard on Monday pulling up wildflowers gone to seed and pulling lots of weeds.  I also spent time pulling up blackberry vines that were growing in the wrong places and cutting away last year's growth.  I have scratches on my arms and prickers stuck in my fingers.  I planted some sunflower seeds - Lemon Queen and Snacker.  Both varieties get big - six to eight feet tall.  I hope they make it!  With seeds you throw a billion against the wall and see what sticks.
• Seeded the Vegetable Garden with Lemon Queen and Snacker Sunflower seeds.  
• Fertilized the eggplants in the Vegetable Garden.
• Turned the compost pile.  
• Watered.  It is terribly dry.  I'm having trouble getting my zinnia seeds started because of the dry conditions.  Max's Garden was really in distress.  I watered in there a lot.
• Watered my La Marne roses with the hose.  
• Put on my tall rubber boots and cleaned out the bed by the master bedroom (it looked kind of snakey in there).  I pulled up six wheel barrows of tuber vervaine.  That bed is one of the few beds that is moist despite the heat and lack of rain.  I seeded it with zinnias.  
• I smoothed out all the beds that have been turned over by the armadillos.  And I filled a massive hole that some critter dug under the root of an oak tree in the back.  But the very next day the hole was back and all the beds had been dug up.  Bastards.
• Pulled up mint in the Kitchen Herb Garden.  The sage is going crazy right now.  Sage likes it dry and hot, I guess.
• I cut back all the Verbena Bonariensis in the Star Garden.  Hauled away many wheel barrows full of debris to the burn pile.  
• Swam on and off all weekend, but a lot on Sunday.  The water felt great!
• Weeded in the beds around the pool.  The new soaker hoses are already messed up.  There is a big hole in each one which totally screws up evenly watering the plants.  I'm not sure if they split or if an animal chewed them. 
• The Naked Ladies are blooming much to my surprise.  And the Philippine Lilies are full of buds.  I will give the parsley one more week for the seeds to dry out and then I will pull up all the unsightly plants in the Orchard.  The bronze fennel in the Orchard is beginning to bloom.  That is a bee favorite. 
• It was a good weekend.  I got lots done.  I'm still cleaning up from the spring season, it is amazing how much debris I have pulled up.   
• None of the morning glory seeds and Moonflower seeds that I planted at the beginning of the season made it.  That is a disappointment, I love morning glories, and they were so pretty last year.  They need moisture, though.  And we don't have any.