While writing the past few posts, something funny occurred to me.

Well my plan for this year was to get the farm in shape. Repair and modify or build structures and fences, form garden beds and let the newer horse manure compost for another year before planting crops, establish a few honeybee hives, get ready for animals, clear some junk trees from the pasture and get trees and perennials established. Basically I wanted this year to be a stress-free set up before any commercial efforts are made.

So I’ve planted a bunch of crops but nothing that will bear a crop this year: trees, blueberries, currants, gooseberries, grapes, hops, bramble berries and hops.

Here is the funny thing:

Despite zero effort, I have corn, sunflower, some sort of cereal grain and pumpkins growing…and growing vigorously. All came from unrelated efforts to build my garden soil: the first three from cottonseed meal to acidify/fertilize the blueberry beds while the later came in with the manure I picked up last November.

 

Grains visible in top left

 

In addition, the hundreds (if not thousands) of naturalized wine raspberries are showing a massive crop of berries this year. Their bloom is over and now all of the bushes are sporting numerous bundles of burrs that will ripen into fruit in the next few weeks. I hope I can beat the birds to a few! Shown in the bottom right (and top left)

This Jurassic park quote sums up this post: life will find a way. Gardening does not have to be hard. Nothing demonstrates this better than this.