Although the last couple of weeks have been extremely hot, we’ve had plenty of rain and the weather has been good for growing crops this summer.
I added an extra garden in my yard this year. Last year, Gator leveled out a spot in the yard and made a really nice garden that gets good morning sun. It just wasn’t quite big enough though, so when he filled in a low area in another part of the yard that gets a lot of sun, I claimed it for another garden. I have to admit, I overdid it. Not only are we getting great growth from our vegetables, the weeds are taking over and I haven’t been able to get them under control. We did get a lot of spinach and lettuce earlier this summer, and I just picked the first of the tomatoes. I need to get out there and pick some peppers and cucumbers, so I can’t really complain.
Another thing we’ve got a bumper crop of is poison ivy. There is a scourge among us!! As it turns out, Gator is highly allergic and has spent most of the summer fighting a rash as well as the weeds.
We’ve managed to keep the trees in the yard free from poison ivy, however the trees along the driveway are another matter. Most are completely covered in it! Not only the trees, either. Poison ivy is growing in the pastures as well. After trying several different ways of killing it, including several homemade solutions – all of which were unsuccessful, Gator finally found a solution which is some type of a salt mixture and is deadly to poison ivy but harmless for animals. It takes a couple of weeks for them to die off but once he was able to start killing those nasty vines, he became obsessed with getting them knocked out. He finally decided he needed a sprayer that had a 25 gallon tank. Just one more implement in our ever growing inventory.
He has made good use of it though. He mounted it onto a pallet so that he can either put it in the bed of the truck or he can pick up with the pallet forks on the tractor (yet another implement we got this year). We got the pastures sprayed and we drove up and down the driveway and sprayed every single tree. The poison ivy has met it’s match!
I think we’ve finally figured out that farmers spend as much time trying to stop things from growing as they do trying to get them to grow…
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