Hoes, Vermin and Carrots

I have at least three hoes. By pure chance, I grabbed my least-favorite hoe for hilling the potatoes. Mrs ERJ had claimed the light-weight, hoe with the red handle. The weeding hoe was behind some shovels.

This hoe is relatively heavy and awkward. Standing on end, the end of the handle is an honest 66" above the ground. The cutting or steel end of the hoe is large and cumbersome. 

And it hills potatoes like a dream. The long handle means that I can drag dirt with the handle at an optimum angle and NOT have to bend over. The big blade means that it moves a lot of dirt in each drag. I can hill one side of 50' of potatoes in two-minutes flat. Of course the dirt was recently till so it was light-and-fluffy, but still, that is a right-smart clip for an old man doing that kind of work.

Yep, another case of different horses for different courses. 

Something raided the duck-coop last night

You can see digging to the left and right of the chunk of firewood

 

Whatever the beast was, it was able to pull out enough eggs to satisfy its hunger and didn't molest the ducks. I was lucky.

 But it will be back. Easy meals will not be passed up.

As luck would have it, I have some wire shelving from a freezer. I dug a trench, laid in the wire "fence" and refilled with packed dirt. To the right of the shelving, I buried chunks of firewood to slow down digging.

 

I also installed a dog-proof raccoon trap and will bait it with a bit of scrambled eggs. It isn't like I don't know what they are hungry for.

Carrots

I have never been successful with carrots. I attribute it to operator apathy.

Carrot seeds are tiny and germinate slowly. The seedlings need frequent, gentle weeding for at least four weeks. Tedious work!

I decided to give it another go.

Reviewing previous failures, one of them is losing-the-row. Weeding is much faster if you know where your crop is not. To mark exactly where I sowed the seed, I added some kale seeds and planted a bush-bean every 2' along the row. You can use any fast-germinating seeds instead of kale...radishes and turnips work very well but the kale seeds were the first suitable seeds that I found.

Carrot seeds are tiny and resent being planted too deeply. I used the hoe to make a furrow and sprinkled the seeds into the very bottom of it. Then I poured a stream of water in to wet the soil and to gently stir it a bit.

Then I laid some cut poke-weeds over the top to delay the soil crusting over. 

Most catalog pictures are too perfect. This one is accurately depicts what I hope to harvest if I do my part. Image from here

For the record, I planted 50 feet of Red-Cored Chantenay variety carrots. RCC is primarily a "processing" or cooking carrot. It produces stubby, tapered carrots that get girthy toward the end of the growing season. It is a carrot designed for stews and juicing and is more forgiving of rocky or clay soils than the more elegant, lady-finger shaped carrots.

A very well grown row of Chantenay carrots can yield up to a pound of carrots per foot of row.

Pottage

AI slop? Maybe.

Pottage, how Medieval families "cooked".

Carrots, potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, radishes, onions, beans, lentils, cracked grain, road-kill, fish, cabbage, greens, dumplings... It is all good.