The Week that Was

Today begins our second week at the ranch and, man, whadda week ...especially as concerns La Quinta (the garden.)  I'm not sure how all of you will feel about a gardening blog just as autumn is settling upon the Northern Hemisphere, but it crunch time here for getting everything into place for the "last frost date" of November 1st.

Gardeners, both active and wannabe, should dig it, I think.  Maybe you missed your chance to garden this year ...or maybe you were so wonderfully successful that the autumn colors are giving you the blues right now.  Then again, your garden may have failed miserably and these posts could have you cheering me on ...or laughing hysterically at my doomed attempts and wasted efforts.

See!  Something for everybody!

The ranching goes on, of course, and this is actually a very busy part of the year for that.  Our gaucho Cristian and I and both of our wives are on 24 hour call as 400 mommy cows give birth all over our spread.  Usually, there is nothing more to that than watching the miracle of birth and oooohing and awwwing at the baby animals.

Occasionally, however, a first-time mommy will have trouble and need assistance.  Sometimes a newborn will be rejected by the mother and we'll all be in for a shift of bottle feeding if we can't find another mother to take him in (rare, but it happens!)  There are as well, caesarian sections that must be performed by our vet ...and he tells me that for some strange reason he has never performed so many as he has this year.

There is also general maintenance and improvements that pop-up and must be performed right away ...but mostly, this time of year is for gardening and helping mommies give birth.

As gauchos generally loathe gardening (Cristian has already referred to my works as "prison labor,") my time will be devoted more to the garden.

And what a monster.  Inside a beautifully constructed Argentine cattle fence, is a plantable area of 45 x 78 feet. About half was under cultivation last year ...and we did pretty well with okra and greens and eeespecially tomatoes!  The other stuff ...not so much.  Weeds and bugs and neglect on our part when we were called away to Buenos Aires City for a couple of prolonged periods.

So this year, we're taking what we learned, stuff that I've read about, and trying to get a jump on spring so as to have a longer growing season.

I even invented a thing or two that you may enjoy.

Long days of lots of work are putting a crimp in my blogging ...but it's spring, after all, and rainy days like today will allow me to put my new communications rig through its paces.  I'll probably write a little about that, too.  It's a little on the laughable side ...but as you can see, it makes possible blogging from the old ranch house with no electricity and no internet!

More to come,
Mike