After having to get a tremendous amount of “real” work and doctors appointments out of the way we are back at the JAZ Farm.  When I arrived (we were in the city for 2.5 days) we discovered that the automatic door to the layer coop hadn’t opened.  Evidently the battery was dead.  The birds had been sequestered in the coop and were more than happy to come out and partake of the scratch grains we provided them.  Now before anyone freaks, they have water in the coop so they were just a tad hungry.  Aaron and I will be off to the Home Depot tomorrow to acquire some lantern batteries that the door requires.

So it was pretty smart of us to make sure the city garden got planted out.  It is doing incredibly well as usual.  We have harvested 2 bushels of spinach, a bushel of Kale (that we use for juicing), and the garlic is on its way to being a bumper crop that I can use to both eat and plant for next year’s supply.  Everything is doing very well.  We are awaiting the small window when the peas will be ready and the strawberries, so far, are our best crop yet.  So the smarts comes from knowing that the country farm garden might be met with some unknowns…. what a understatement.

HOWEVER:  Quit whining Farmer Jon!!  Sure we have to write off the eggplants and most of the tomatoes at the JAZ Farm because of the hail, but everything else is doing great!!  We are going to build a greenhouse this fall which will cover all of those more sensitive plants; it is an unexpected evolution but it will solve the hail problem.  The root vegetables and the beans and all of the corn, onions, asparagus, beets and carrots are on their way to being very successful.  Perspective is everything.  When you are sitting in your home listening to the gates of hell unleash upon your property during a hail storm, one thinks all is lost.  The truth is that mother nature is resilient.  We are going to have quite a harvest should this growth continue.  So between the city garden that has been used as a back up and the experiment of the JAZ Farm, we will have a great deal of food to put by for the coming winter.  When we get the greenhouse put up, all the more.

I had my engineer wannabe, Aaron, figure out how to lay out a rectangle on the ground to put in a fence to house the pigs we will be getting next fall.  Tomorrow we will be getting batteries for the chickens, fence and fence posts for the pig pen and yet another project will have begun.

The only deterrent right now is the plague of mosquitoes that have hatched from all of the standing water left over from the storms.  The outdoor clothes will be quite thoroughly doused in bug juice so we can continue the farm development during the non-snowy month!

Our wheat field, evidently has been considered a loss.  The farmer we leased the land to is going to have someone come out and cut it down and bale it.  I am not too upset as I will be receiving about 100 straw bales that can be used to bed the chickens and mulch the garden beds.  On top of that, as it has been declared a loss, I may head out with my weed whip and knock a bunch of it down and try to salvage some wheat.  We will have hard corn for corn meal this year and will need a grinder.  Might as well gather as much wheat as we can since it isn’t going to be sold, and save it to make our own bread.

Farm Jon….. da man got smarts, skeels, and should just quit the freakin’ whining over the hail that didn’t get everything.  I love the JAZ Farms!