many hands make light work

Today I was able to get the kids to join me in the garden. That's not always an easy sell, but today I offered them a choice of tasks, as follows:

harvest strawberries | weed the garden containers | plant Dakota Black popcorn | thin the fig tree | prune the Meyer lemon tree | harvest lemons

My 9-year-old daughter opted to plant the popcorn. Our good friends in town gave us the kernels, which we soaked overnight and then planted, 4 kernels per hole, spaced 4" apart. We love popcorn, so growing our own sounds very exciting! 

My 6-year-old son chose to pull out the pesky purslane that has popped up aggressively in the box where peppers and celery are growing. The drip watering system had just finished watering, so pulling the weeds out was quick work. 

While they busied themselves with those tasks, I harvested strawberries. We planted 84 Albion strawberry plants in early 2019. Last year, a number of them died from lack of water (there was a clog in the water line). Something I learned in 2020 is that fewer, healthy strawberry plants are easier to take care of and produce more, better fruit than a greater number of unhealthy plants. These Albion strawberry plants are in their third year of production, so I will begin planting runners, removing the mother plants, and rotating the new plants into different boxes this year. I don't know how or when to do this yet, but as with everything else on our little farm, we learn as we go!

Speaking of learning as we go, today's on-the-fly learning experience was thinning the fig tree. We haven't yet identified the variety of fig tree we have, but for the past two years we've had large harvests of quality fruit, most of which I've turned into fig jam. I like to share the jam with my Airbnb guests, while my daughter and I love it on crackers with goat cheese.

We made some mistakes pruning the fig tree last year, and this year it has gotten way too tall. It looks healthy and beautiful, but the fruit is way over our heads. Most of the small branches have between 5-7 large figs that should ripen sometime in July, as well as a few tiny little ones that don't have time to ripen. I hope that by removing some of the smaller figs, more energy will go into ripening the large ones. Unfortunately my internet research has been inconclusive on this topic, so I am following my intuition. It could be another mistake, but only time will tell!

The kids lost steam about midway through working on the fig tree, so I finished up myself and then headed down to the Meyer lemon tree along our driveway. It was a tangled, dense, thorny mess that I am pretty sure has never been pruned. Picking lemons was almost impossible without scratching oneself severely, so I knew it was time to prune. With a pair of heavy-duty shears and some long gloves, I pruned out the dead wood, branches that were rubbing together, and branches inside the plant that were not bearing any fruit. After an hour or so, the tree was transformed, and I was able to pick 23 pounds of lemons.

All in all, it was a successful and productive day on the farm. Many hands make light work!