Busy Time on the Farm- and Why Deer Season Can't Come Soon Enough!

These days it is really hard to get the chores done as I am having to work six nine and ten-hour days a week off the farm and my husband has ten to twelve-hour days at his job. We somehow are getting it done, a little later than it should be, but it is getting done. We bagged up our first crop of alfalfa hay to make silage in individual bags. These are not cheap, even though the bags are re-usable, so you can imagine how put out we are with the deer that they are using those bags for practice butting heads and are tearing holes in them as a result. The holes lead to excess air getting into them and thus rots the silage, ruining it. We have special tape for the holes, but if not found soon enough, it will be too late. We did get about three hundred small bales of hay for the mow and I don't know yet what the final tally is of the round bales of dry hay from the second crop.We should have three crops of hay, but with the lack of rain, it's just not going to happen.

                                                There are fifty silage bales we do not need ruined!

My apple trees are loaded this year, and even though I did prune them back, the limbs are still extremely heavy so between the deer having a snack- grrrr- and the wind, my limbs are breaking off or attempting to do so. We need rain to help them fill out too, or they will stay small rather than being the fat, juicy apples they have been in the past. Also thanks to the deer, I have lost two of three plum trees we planted in honor of our son joining the Navy.

                        Damaged apple tree thanks to the deer. Hunting season can't come soon enough this year!

Our corn is nice and tall, but not filling out all that well thanks to the lack of rain; same goes for the soybeans unfortunately. I understand that due to all the rain we had in the spring and the extremely long cold season, many farmers throughout the Midwest weren't even able to plant this year, and crop insurance doesn't help if you never got it planted in the first place. Wisconsin is in the top three states for not getting to plant. We are right in the heart of the worst hit area. Another problem with the corn for us is, you guessed it: the deer. The way my husband explained it, the silks on each ear is attached to the kernels (one to one) and the tassels on top of the plant pollinate the kernels via the silk strands as well as the rain going through them to help fill out the kernels. The deer keep eating the ends off my corn destroying the silks and therefore ruining the corn ears, if they don't just outright eat the corn- stalk, cob and all. Are you seeing a trend here? The critters are not helping my soybeans either!

We do have the squash that ate Wisconsin! In my raised bed I planted okra (does not grow well in Wisconsin), yellow crook-neck squash, butternut squash, cucumbers and watermelon (also does not grow well this far north). Yesterday I picked a bushel of cucumbers and now I will really have to bust my you-know-what to get the pickles made since I am at work so much and have very little time. I also got a half bushel of yellow squash. Somehow I have more plant than squash. I'm not kidding. I took a picture last week (see photo below) and this week we got about a quarter-inch of rain and it got even bigger; as in waist high! I push the leaves aside and call out: "Anybody down there?" when I'm looking for squash. The butternut has grown across the garden too in all four directions and is now mixed with the cucumbers and watermelon plants and through the yellow squash and okra, and is growing over the logs and into the yard all four directions. Composted cow manure, even years old, is something else. I'm thinking of top dressing my regular ground level garden and tilling it in this fall. I'll have to spray it heavily with Round-Up to keep the weeds out, but it should rejuvenate the soil nicely for next year.

                                                 The squash plants that ate Wisconsin!

Update on Night Shade
I got a call the other day from the folks who sold us the sheep we used to have. They had previously bought hay from us but distance and gas prices made it prohibitive to get more. They bought hay from someone closer to them and had spread it out in their sheep pen for the animals to eat. The farmer who made the hay either didn't know about night shade or didn't care. This year it sprouted up in the sheep pen and took it over and now they have lambs and some of their prized rams dying left and and right. They were just pulling it up and throwing it in the woods adjacent to the pens. Yikes! I told her to get it out of the woods immediately and burn it, being careful not to be near the smoke and get it or the animals out of that pen. If there is too much to pull up- and it sounds like it might be- they need to spray it with Round-Up or the generic equivalent, and not the ready mixed stuff either. You can buy it in concentrated form and mix it yourself, which is what we do, and then double the recommended amount of the chemical to do a really good job. As directed it will work for spraying crops, but if you are trying to get rid of night shade, you're going to have to double it and kill it good and dead, and then apply again when it starts growing again, because it had already gone to seed (the berries) and they will regrow. Of course nothing else will grow in that pen for a while, but when the night shade stops coming up, you can quit spraying and a few months (I think it's twelve weeks for gardens before one can plant tomatoes which are related to night shade) replant with a good quality grass seed and keep an eye out for that deadly weed.

How is your garden doing this year? Is the lack of rain ruining it? Or too much rain? I had better get busy now. I have pickles to just waiting to be made!