Missy

Poor Missy has had to be tied up for way too long.  We’ve had some rain, or chances for storms.  We learned right away that lightening makes her run blindly and fast in any direction.  So we keep her down in the barn.  When the weather is nice, we keep her on her long cord outside because we’ve had some contractors working on the grain bins to finish up work before harvest.  She can’t be around wet cement, or large holes, or be underfoot.  She’s so curious about everything which is good.  It’s just been a bit of time where she can’t just be herself on the property.  So I’ve been trying to carve out at least an hour each day to just let her run and burn off some of that energy.  I can’t always do it, but I try.

I love the time outside with Missy.  The weather is just so perfect.  The colors in the field are changing daily.  Fall is pretty darn close to my favorite season.  It might be tied with winter.  Knut and I get so excited every year for when the weather gets cold enough to start running the fireplace around the clock.

Then harvest started.  That’s always a huge praise.  That changes the landscape in a hurry as well.  Unpredictable schedules have taken over.  That part is hard.  The good part is that Missy loves harvest. She hasn’t had to be tied up at all during this new season.  Whenever we have put her in the barn, she has about an hour or two of getting into stuff she shouldn’t, and then she gets to business.  All during this season she’s been staying in the yard, and watching the semi-trucks come up our driveway filled with grain.  She knows the trucks and the drivers now, and only stands up to investigate if it’s someone unusual…like the internet guys.

I was worried that she would be in the way of harvest, or slow up the semis.  It’s been just the opposite. It’s almost like she senses the importance, and is determined to lend a hand…or paw.  She doesn’t stray far from the house when harvest is running.  She feels the need to keep an eye on us during the ruckus.

On the exciting side, besides harvest, it feels as though we’re on the verge of actually doing some things to our property that we have only been talking about for the last few years.  We are talking about moving our vegetable garden to a new location next year, and adding even more animals.  I know, new cats and a new dog and a few more chickens weren’t enough?  Knut really wants to turn half of our yard into pasture.  He spends hours each week mowing, and it seems a waste of resources, both time and money.  We want a couple of steers, and I would love a few dairy goats.  David really wants to get some pigs and we’ve been talking about fencing up our woods for that purpose.  Silje really wants some rabbits just for fun, but we wanted to wait until we had a few animals in the barn so they wouldn’t be alone there.

So a few weekends ago, Silje and I did a lot of vegetable bed planning and this week we hope to tie up strings marking off our new vegetable garden so on a day when they can’t harvest, Knut can bring the tiller and till up our new beds.  Then we’ll add some compost, and let it rest until spring.  We’re planning more of a French style garden, with walkways and patches rather than the long rows we’ve been doing so far.

We got a new gardening book on companion gardening, which is really fascinating.  This book has answered so many questions of why certain garden crops have been failing these last few years.  (Besides the fact I’m horrible at weeding.)  This last year I planted dill by the carrots, which is a big no-no.  I also put my Brussel sprouts by the tomatoes, which is also horrible.  Really I’ve just been sticking things in the ground and hoping for the best, which worked for a few years, but we’ve now had 2 years of failed pea crops and 2 years of failed squash, and this book is answering a lot of questions as to why, and things I can do to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

We read in this book why our apple trees have been failing.  We just planted a few more replacements this last spring, and we’ll probably leave them since they are well rooted.  The ones that were there before mysteriously died.  We couldn’t figure out what happened.  There were no outbreak of bugs or disease.  They just died.

Well, it turns out, that happens often when you plant fruit trees by a black walnut tree.  The black walnut tree has always been there, and the apple orchard was always there.  In the gardening world these 2 types of trees are not very friendly with each other.  While we know the apple trees that are there now will have a shorter lifespan because of this, we’re just going to leave them be, and then if we want to plant more fruit trees, we’ll look to anther area of the property: far away from the black walnut.

Anyway, by these trees is where our new garden is going.  It will be fenced from the chickens whose coop is nearby.  It will still have a lot of sunlight, though it’s not as exposed to the elements with the trees around.  Our other garden is very exposed to wind, and that has caused some problems.  We have well established strawberries, raspberries and asparagus in our old garden location, so we plan to leave those there and let them expand.  Everything else is moving up to the new location.

In all reality, we haven’t been doing bad since our freezer is already full of garden goodness for the winter.  So trying and “failing” hasn’t been that silly.  I’m excited for the new venture in this area.  I’m not sure if it’s exciting enough to entice me to weed more, but you never know.  Miracles do happen.