On Thursday I was out in the garden by 6AM but my helper never came. I got the badly rusted leaves off the hollyhocks, weeded, and pulled the buggy stuff off the brassicas. I finished about 9AM and was soaked to the waist. I'd finished the second third of the garden.
The beets on the left are ready to harvest. The celery in the middle is the best I’ve had in a long time. And the basil that had such a bad start has come back and is about to flower. My brother says he wants to make pesto with it on Sunday.
My helper friend showed up at 10:30AM and he had 2 jobs: reworking the butter and checking the onions in the root cellar. We started with the butter. It had been so warm when I finished it last Friday that I could not press all the water out.
So my idea was to take the chilled butter, break it up, and press it again while it was cold. So my helper did the breaking up, and ferrying the baking dishes full of butter to and fro from the fridge.
I did the pressing. I quickly discovered that the water would spray everywhere as it came out of the butter so I kept a paper towel over the area I was working. I think I got most of the water out but we still ended up with far more butter than ever before. It took us about 2 hours to do this, then we had to clean the kitchen again.
I was pretty wiped out when he left about 1PM. I rested during the afternoon as Tom and 2 of his kids were coming later to start the pasture garden.
We started on the NW corner, working about 6’ across heading east. Phoebe has a new puppy and the puppy was helping for all she was worth. She was trying to eat every grub we found.
It took us a while to work out the best way to remove the sod and to find the 10 day old cut lines.
Once we found our rhythm we made pretty good progress. When the tractor needed emptied behind the Tonka garage, Wiley was the driver. A nice steady breeze had come up and the humidity had dropped and it was really pleasant working out there.
The sod had started to re-attach in places, and being driven on didn’t help. But just tossing the sods into the bucket was really helpful. We made it this far on the first day, finishing about 7PM.
I had set up my supper before they came, zoodles, and sausages. I just had to make the zoodles and cook everything, about 10 minutes time. Then I had to close the house up as thunderstorms were coming in the night.
On Friday, I have to get up early and get last week’s butter packaged and into the freezer, and get the kitchen cleaned up before 8AM when my helper friend arrives to start this week’s butter. I also have a company coming to fit a temporary ramp into the house for my mother’s visit the first of August. Then it’s supposed to thunderstorm the rest of the day.