The Watermelon of BRSK Farm

What is bigger than a loaf of bread?

Taller than a jar of jelly, a paper towel roll, a knife block, and a spatula?

What intimidates a basketball?

What makes a farmer work on an uphill pull?

What stresses the scale to beyond its 70 pound limit?

The Monster Watermelon!

After defeating the Monster....

..we found it is tasty, put a bit pale.

Since it really did bottom out that 70 pound scale,

we wanted to know how much it might really weigh.

The half weight weigh in was

40 pounds! 

At an estimate 80 pounds total, that was one giant melon! 

And the chickens say... 

Bring on the Rind!!!

They will eat this down to paper thin. No really, they will.

It is amazing.

The Pet Safe Weed Killer Experiment

I saw this posted by a friend on FB.

My yard is full of dandelions and I would like to get rid of them, safely.

So I went shopping for the mix and then applied it.

This is the first test area at 10 am.

At 2 pm. YAY!

Second area at 10 am.

At 2 pm.

The driveway gravel should be successful since I don't have to worry about over spray killing the grass, though I am not really sure it is effective on grass. The lawn will be a much harder project partially due to over spray concerns, but also because there are soooooo many weeds out there. They do make the yard "look" green, unless they blooming.

After a bit of research about "why" this works I have figured out that the salt could cause nothing to grow in the spot again. Also, there is a lot of debate about how dangerous RoundUp really is. I do know that a gallon of vinegar is a lot cheaper and less toxic to the overall environment than a gallon of RoundUp.

My determination is:

1. I will pull any weeds that I can.
2. I will continue to use this mix on the gravel since I do not want anything to ever grow there again. 
3. I will make another mix with no salt for the lawn.
4. I will use RoundUp, carefully, on the weeds that are not effected by the vinegar/soap mix.

I didn't get much more done than the above pictures show since we were expecting rain. I want to do the driveway area on a nice day when there is plenty of sun to cook those leaves. Oh, that reminds me. One of the "RoundUp" agenda believers said that the vinegar doesn't do anything to the roots of the plants. That might be true, but if the root doesn't have any leaves to feed it death will eventually come to the root.

There will be more results posted whenever I can get a sunny day.

2012 Taters, at least that many

The potato haul for this year is pretty good.

Good size and numbers.

Tomatoes on the other hand won't ripen.

I know they were planted late, but come on!

We just might have to eat them all green!

2012 Garden

 Last year I had some really big sunflowers in the garden.

I left most of them with the seed heads for the birds.

The stalks survived the winter and even a couple of the volunteer seeds grew up.

I would have gotten rid of them, but I had an idea.

I have lots of ideas.

What if I planted pole beans under the stalks?

Would they vine up? Some of them are figuring out the system.

Some of the bean vines are going a little wild.

I have since tied them with some twine to see if they figure it out.

The rest of my garden is pretty much behind the curve.

I got things planted late.

These are red potatoes. The guys planted white potatoes up on the hill.

I wanted some variety. 

These are banana peppers.

Kinda funky looking. I keep trying with them.

  

In the front bed I have some yellow squash and zucchini. They are small, but growing.

In the back are my tomatoes. The boards are what is left of my old ladder cages. Since we are using the raised beds now, the cages didn't really work. So I took them apart and have been meaning to rebuild them so that they work better with the raised beds. There is my first one in the back. That is a single tomato, the other two piles are two plants each. I really need to get them fixed up. The hole in between them is where the wind ripped two more out of the ground on the 29th.

Maybe before winter I will get some vegetables out of there.

I have fun goofing with the garden. So that works.

Last Week in the Yard

The sunflowers are all seeding.

The bees have been busy

But even on a misty day the sun can finally come through.

The grape vine was (and is again) full. 

So that this pot of grapes

becomes

this awesome juice.

The goat house is getting a roof.

More coming this weekend.

Come back later.

Sunflowers

The difference from last week's photo doesn't show much height change, but...

August 9

they started blooming, which means they will stay looking East.

Since I usually get these pictures in the afternoon all my pictures have been taken from the West side

to make sure the sun didn't interfere.

Like with this one.

I put the sun directly behind the bloom to get a real sunny flower.

So this morning, August 14, I went out and got a nice picture of the blooms.

By the way, that is a tomato frame on the left and it is about 7 1/2 feet tall.

If you look closely you will see there are some busy bees on those flowers. 

Much like this one. Busy, busy, busy. 

Sunflower Aug 2 update

July 23

Aug 1

Water Us Please!

I did by the way.

After all the blogs I have posted recently I just realized I hadn't put up the Sunflower growth post from last weekend yet. So I figured I can just combine it with the latest update.

This is from July 18th.  

And this is July 23rd.

These things are getting monstrous.

There really is corn in there too. This pic is from the 18th, 

but in the one from the 23rd you can see some tassels.

This is my straight neck squash.

Surrounded by marigolds and STILL I had to squish squash bug eggs today.

No deterrent there. Not sure if there should be either, but plenty of eggs got squished.

There are plenty of bees out there too.

While I was squishing bugs the honey bees were buzzing, which was okay, 

but the wasps and stinging bees that showed up weren't so welcome. 

Then again, I didn't bother them and they didn't bother me, physically anyway, either.

This is my bean patch. It used to be the pea patch.

It is producing pretty well.

This is the first batch of beans and the third squash.

Hopefully I will get more squash. Last year the plants were ruined by bugs.

I have tomatoes.

I started this year with three kinds of tomatoes.

A Better Boy, a Parks Whoppers - both supposed to be about 15 ounce fruit

and one yellow tomato that should be about 7 ounces.

 These are the Brandywine tomatoes that I got from Jones.

They are pretty far behind my others, 

but that will be okay since I don't want them all coming in at one anyway.

This is a sawdust pile. It will be used to mulch the beds, but not right now. 

It is hot out there.

Where did the pile come from? Well that will be a post in the Farm Fun category.

Later!

Sunflower Update

I am a bit early with the sunflower update this week, but since I will be in Missouri for most of the weekend I thought I better get this out now.

This was the first week, about June 14.

Then the next update from June 22.

This is June 30.

And this is July 7!!! They ate the scarecrow!

This is Violet and the girls - Sweet Pea, Tulip, and Daisy.

They want to know if you have any cookies, cheerios, or sweet feed -

because you can see they have nothing else to eat.

Nothing at all.