Well, July has come and gone and I'm not sure what happened to it. We've had a flurry of activity around our place lately, which probably accounts for the time passing quickly. The past few weeks the major activities have centered around getting ready for the Douglas County Fair. Our kids are showing pigs and rabbits at the fair, and getting the animals ready for the show is a time-consuming process. There are the daily weighings, baths, and walks for the pigs, and the regular nail clipping and grooming for the rabbits. Several of the show pigs have gained weight at a slower than expected rate this summer, and this causes additional stress on us as we help the kids find ways to increase the pigs' rate of weight gain. We'll get there, I think.
As for the rest of the farm, we're ramping up on the vegetable harvest. The beans have started coming in, and we've picked many pounds of pole beans. We grow the old standby Kentucky Wonder, and this year we added a yellow wax pole bean that is just fabulous. We cut our first few broccoli heads a few days ago, and the taste is so much better than the broccoli from the supermarket. The kids devoured our first cucumbers in about 5 minutes. We've been pulling beets for several weeks now, and are thoroughly enjoying them. We tried two new varieties this year: a long, narrow beet that slices nicely, and a yellow beet. The yellow beets are really nice looking. They have a slight tint of red-orange to them, and pickling them in jars makes for a very pretty product. We have begun harvesting our first few summer squashes, as well.
The potatoes, onions, and carrots are doing well, although we need several more weeks of growth before we can begin harvesting these crops. We are hoping for a very nice potato harvest this year. Our part of Colorado used to be famous for potatoes, many years ago. We like the way they've been growing so far, and if it ever dries out enough for us to get in the field and hill them up, we'll be very happy.
Of course, we will not complain in the least about the moisture we've been having. We had about 5 inches of rain during July, which is unheard of for our area. Some of the moisture came very rapidly as hail, and shredded some of the outdoor crops. Our outdoor cucumbers were destroyed last week, and I don't know if they'll make it or not. But that's part of the challenge of farming. We take the good with the bad and thank the Lord that we're out in the country enjoying His creation.
