Time is flying by here on the farm. Bonnie, my long-time friend, said to me yesterday that we have already been in Cawston for 28 days. It is amazing how much we have done already in this time, though I wish she could stay so that we could continue to explore the beautiful Okanagan.
Last week on the farm we continued to do the work we had started a few weeks earlier and finished up quite a few jobs. We finished planting the tomato plants finally, then moved on to planting a couple of rows of basil which are currently still looking a little yellow. I learned when we plant the basil to remove the heads of the plant to encourage them to bulk up.
I spent an afternoon mowing one of our peach orchards, because we have moved right away into thinning the peaches which I have been told will grow much more quickly than the apricots have (which is very fast in my opinion). The peaches also need to be given much more space to grow than the apricots were, so we are thinning quite extensively. We are giving them a space from about your thumb tip to your pinkie tip while extended. Seeing how full the apricot trees are now that the apricots have grown, it barely seems like we thinned them at all. I have taken this as a lesson for the peaches - take off more than you think you should.
We spent some time weeding the onions which are also growing fast, though not as quickly as the weeds. I was recently away for five days and I can't believe how much everything grew in my absence.
The last job for this week was cleaning out the chicken coup - great. The birds were all chased out and we started piling the manure into wheel barrels to take over to the compost heap. If you have never been in a chicken coop, when you unsettle the layer upon layer of straw and crap (excuse my language) that has been leveled down, the smell is suffocating. But the job had to be done and it was quite rewarding when we had sorted the spaces out for the birds.
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