When I went to bed last night, I realized I had never gone back out to put metal sticks beside the Fava beans to protect them from cutworms. Surely it would be too cold for them to be out and about, right?
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| Poor little Fava bean. :( |
Well, maybe not. I don't know if it was a cutworm or a rabbit, but one of the beans was flopped over, its little stem chewed almost in two near the base. Very suspicious, like cutworm damage. I got my little pieces of wire and stuck one wire by each plant - that has seemed to work in the past. And for good measure, I put metal cages around the plants to hopefully protect them from rabbits - just in case it was a rabbit that chewed the stem of that one little plant.
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| Fava beans, staked and caged. |
Next, I decided to go ahead and set out some plants in the raised beds around the cellar. I put radishes and lettuce in the east bed.
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| Tiny little plants, set out into the big world outside. |
And because I didn't want to take a chance that my snow peas would get their roots all intertwined like the Fava beans had done, I went ahead and set them out too. The top parts of the plants were still very small, but they already had roots coming out the bottom of their toilet paper tubes!
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| Little snow peas in the west raised bed. The dirt wasn't very deep here, but I hope it's enough for them. |
After lunch, I had a nice walk with my younger sister, then decided to finish up the Hügelkultur row. I packed in a few more limbs and sticks. Then I want out into the field to gather up some more straw, but the more I thought about it, the more worried I was that doing that was just bringing weed seeds into the garden. So instead, I just loaded the cart with fresh cow manure. I put some of the straw I had bought down over the logs, then topped that with a good layer of manure.
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| Some pretty fresh manure.... |
Then it was time to move the dirt back onto the row. Now that was some hard work. The dirt had been rained on, not once, but twice and was very, very heavy! But one forkful at a time, and eventually I had most of it back over the mound.
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| The row is finally finished. |
Another layer of straw, and I can now mark that project off as done. Wow...I actually finished something!!!
It was too late to cut any privet, so I decided to just try to finish up shredding the last of the limbs RAF helped me bring up from the woods yesterday. I figured out that it's better to strip off the small twiggy ends of the limbs because they don't shred anyway...they just zip right through the shredder, or worse, get wrapped up around the blade. I can hear the shredder bog down when that happens, and have to turn it off, unplug it, open it up, and untangle the little twigs from around the rotating assembly. Not only that, but I watched a video about a man who put privet limbs in his Hügelkultur bed, and - horror of horrors - they took root and started growing again! I have lots of little twigs in my walking rows now, so I'll definitely have to be on the lookout for anything that tries to start growing and rip it out before it has a chance to take ahold. Wouldn't that just be the ultimate kick in the teeth....
Anyway, it was getting pretty late by the time I was finishing up, and about that time the neighbor in the trash trailer decided to start a fire. Burning trash, I suppose? But he made the most frightening roaring fire that shot black smoke straight up into the sky! And because the winds at the higher level were from the West-Southwest, when the smoke got high enough, the smoke was picked up and carried right over my head! And it took the smoke a long ways! We could see a big black trail going all the way to the mountains east of us.
The smoke was so bad that my aunt texted me and asked what was on fire. They saw the smoke from their house and were afraid it was my sister's house burning. Lots of trucks went up and down the road in front of our house - volunteer fire-fighters, I'm thinking. I doubt the guy called the number to let the Sheriff's office know he was going to burn anything, so everyone who saw that black, black smoke was afraid it was a house fire. My sister said he had a pile of old furniture out in his yard, so I'm guessing it was the foam cushions spitting that toxic smoke up into the air.
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| Even about 30 minutes after the fire was lit, it was still shooting black smoke into the air. |
I wish I had thought to take a picture of the fire when I first saw it but I was too busy trying to figure out how anyone could be such an idiot to start such a big fire with all of that other junk so close by.
As I told my sister when I texted her about it, "Now that's a FAR!!!!"