Fun in the Potato Field

It doesn’t appear as though the Lord would have me blogging much recently. The garden work on top of a new cookbook has kept pretty much everything else to a minimum these past few months. But then a few weeks ago (or is it a month, now?), my hard drive just up and died. Once that was replaced – and thank the Lord for His mercy in prompting us to back up most of the cookbook work – it was about a week or two later that my power cord gave out.

And to be honest, since Stewart has been working full-time away from the homestead, I have personally felt a lot of self-imposed burden to, ya know, keep everyone and everything alive. If my calculations are correct, we have roughly (okay, exactly) six children, two bovines, seven goats, two pigs, and nearly one hundred birds around these parts. The six children and the milk cow are all still alive – thank the Lord! – but we lost a milk goat and a meat bird and the calf up and ran off with the neighbors’ cows. We’re going to try and get her back when we can, but there’s no fixing the goat or chicken situation. And did I mention that our goat kids are nursing off our milk cow and I have no idea how to break that cycle?

Pretty much pretending to be a farmer over here.

Anyways, here we are, weeks after our discussion of spring and things are just starting to warm up. While I was away I took a lot of photos I hope to update you all with. For starters, we worked at the final hilling (and weeding!) of the potato field. Our ten-year-old has been trying his hand behind the camera so I am actually in front of the camera rather than behind it for a change.

Hilling up eight of these fourty-foot rows was a fair amount of work, especially with our wet, clay soils so it was interesting to me what these photos captured: Fun! The day these were taken I think we finished up six of those rows. What these photos don’t capture is the other two rows Daddy finished and that we have actually lost quite a few of the potato plants to the unusually high (or is this normal? I’ll never know) amount of rain we’ve gotten this year.

But the majority of the potatoes are still kicking and the hilling is complete for the season so all that is left is the fun of harvesting in about a month or so. We intend to repeat planting sweet potatoes after we harvest the Irish potatoes come mid-June, Lord willing. So we will see what the Lord wills as far as a harvest goes and I will try to share that when it comes.