Long Time

So, it's been a while. I got busy, and I thought I'd use Facebook for this blog instead, but I wasn't doing it. I sorta like this format, so I'm going back to it. Since we last talked, Tink has come and gone, with her investment property rented out. Farming continues. The year started with protests. Catherine looks so cute in her pink pussy hat. I made a bunch of these and met a lot of neat women by giving them out.

We had a cold wet spring, and then a suddenly very hot summer. We literally went from wool hats and coats one week to 105 temps the next. Rough time for farming. Here we are still bundled up in April, when Linda and Dwight visited.

We are playing ukes at the farm now; we needed something to do since the chickens do all the work... This has been a huge ton of fun. Catherine started it all, but I quickly joined in.

Pretty soon we had other fun folks joining us.

This is actually my second uke. It's just so pretty!

Spring was tough on the fruit trees because it was rainy and windy during bloom time. Plums didn't produce much, but the cherries did better than usual.

Despite the wet spring, we got our summer crops in.

By midsummer, everything is looking good. Notice the shadecloth: that turned out to be real lifesaver later in the season. We also mulched heavily. I planted pole beans between the tomato rows for more shade, but the beans didn't do well. Next time I'll just rely on shadecloth.

The plants got nice and big. We had a very productive tomato year.

This is an early July harvest. 

This summer was stupidly hot. We had 40 days over 100 degrees, many of them consecutive. And for the most part, it didn't cool down at all at night. Tomatoes won't set fruit in those conditions, but due to the shade cloth (I got real and put it 6 feet high) and heavy mulching, we still got a crop.

We had a couple good performing varieties this year. The Black Brandywines were super delicious. Rick says they are the best BLT tomato.

 And the Atomic Grapes performed like a champ in the heat, putting out lots of saladette size multicolored tomatoes.

But by far the best crop was the peaches. They got a few days of no rain during bloom, and they went nuts. I didn't even go to the University Farm this year because I got enough.

And in case this sounds like all we did was farm... We took a road trip to Woodland to surprise Ob (before his surgery, which was successful, yay!) and stopped off at Sutter Buttes.

 We also checked out the new Chico Taproom.

We like the patio.