A plastic garden...

This day was filled brim full of busyness once again! First thing this morning, Dad took off to pick up our Azure order in Dawson which arrived there at 7:30 this time!

The boys and I did the morning milking and other barnyard chores, then Andrew helped me spread out the roll of black plastic I'd bought over about half the garden (that's all the roll covered.) It was rather windy this morning, and for a while there, we had a huge black parachute we could almost have blown away with. We did get the black flyaway landed back on solid ground again and then laid old tires around the edges. Still, the wind was trying to blow the plastic away. I decided to give our friends, the G. family, a call to see how they keep the black plastic on their garden, as I know they've done it for years with great success.

The secret?

Morgan said to dig a little trench, tuck the end of the plastic in and then dump the dirt back in on top of it. Sooooo, I started digging, and I was very glad when the guys all came with shovels in hand to help! They put the dirt they dug into wheelbarrows and then dug a ways before putting the plastic down and dumping the dirt back on top. It took about 2 hours, but we now have a covered rectangle area of about 80x25' and a smaller area (covered with what was left on the roll of plastic) of about 15x25'.

The purpose of this all?

To keep the weeds down (thus saving a LOT of time that would be spent in pulling Kochia and Creeping Jenny and Grass and Dandelions and....). Also, vegetables that like a lot of heat (tomatoes, eggplant, peppers...) should do really well with the black plastic to draw heat around them.

Once we were done with that project, Mom helped us mulch the strawberry pyramid. Then we ate an early lunch and my parents headed for Bismarck to do errands and Mom had clients to see.

Meanwhile back at home, the boys cleaned out all the remaining squash from the basement and took a load of garbage out to "The Hole".... Then they worked on Andrew's pickup for most of the afternoon.

I started planting the garden. :) It takes a while to plant into the plastic, so hopefully the end results will be worth the extra time needed now... I was planting in my circle garden (it's in the same place as I had it last year, as several of the flowers came back, so Andrew and Jacob just tilled around them), when I hear some thunder and felt a cooling breeze. Not long after, huge raindrops started to fall. I headed for the greenhouse with my packets of seeds and planned to wait out the worst part of the storm there, but then it started to hail and I figured it would be better to be under wood than under plastic at such a time as that, so I dashed out the door and ran around the corner under the storage shed roof. After about 10 minutes, everything returned to the way it was before, except for the fact that I was pretty wet (rain blew in through the eves and dripped down along the seams in the plywood ceiling and the wind was so strong that I had a hard time finding a dry spot to stand!) I checked on the greenhouse first. No damage done, other than a couple small hail holes, which may have been from the last hail storm we had? Some of the mulch from the strawberry bed was blown away; a nest fell out of a tree; the side of the house was plastered with wet leaves; and some tin on our pole barn curled up and bent, but other than that (and the fact that we had half an inch of rain in that quick shower) things were calm as they were before.

The boys and I had supper and then went out to do chores. It was lovely out once we were done that we played a couple games of Boccee again. Andrew invented "Speed Boccee", which was pretty fun. We took turns throwing our balls and the rule was: You had to throw your ball before the last persons' ball quit rolling or else you didn't get to throw it at all. Fun!

Then it was back in the house for some R&R time.

For Andrew, this meant: Loading pictures on the computer and writing a couple blog posts...
For Jacob, this meant: Playing farming simulator...
For myself, this meant: Sewing the sleeves into my dress and pinning the side seams together for future sewing...

Dad and Mom returned home around dark, tired and hungry. We had family prayer time, after family catch-up-on-what-all-happened time, and now it's bed time!

Good night~