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I had one that belonged to my Grandpa. All wood and metal and hand-made. I donated it to The Seed Savers Exchange when I worked there - we used it in window displays at our Monroe Street store and now Diane uses it at the Welcome Center at the farm in Decorah, IA.

I’ve visited, ‘my plow’ twice so far. :)

It seems I have a powdery mildew issue. Saw it first on the tatsoi which I figured was a summer heat issue, then on celery and thought the same plus the stalks are fine and that's the edible part anyway and now on the baby cukes and melons which can obviously take the heat.

So I asked perplexity.ai - diseases or conditions that cause white or light colored spots on the foliage of garden vegetables including brassica greens, cucurbits and melons but not tomatoes or peppers.

One or more of 11,000 different types of Powdery mildew was #1 and most common. I have no purple so it's not downy mildew and all else were obscure conditions.

My maters and peppers are unaffected. The #1 cure is to plant resistant varieties and by my reading, I'm kinda stuck with it now that it's here. Pull all affected plants and trash or burn them. That would be everything but the tomatoes and peppers. Treat as soon as you see -- too late

And now I feel like pulling all my mulch out so things can dry up and also wondering if I didn't bring it in with the hay I'm mulching with. I just started mulching but the hay has been sitting in the tunnel for a few months now and I've never had an issue with any sort of foliage condition until now.

I can see why some people don't bring in "resources" from outside. I brought horse nestle here with a load of horse manure and now possibly downy mildew with some hay.

Resistant Varieties rules out Baker Creek for seeds since they don't rank anything by resistance to common issues. Just did a search on rareseeds.com for "powdery" and got a whopping 12 results including 6 squashes and 2 flowers.

Well this sucks.

The last board (I think) is up on the lean-to project. I had one section of pieced together cattle panel & T-posts that the former owner had up & I decided to leave it. The last board was one to run along the top of the cattle panel to give me a solid edge & steady it up. I had 8 ft. boards (96”) & needed 104”. Hmmmm. After one false start (plan not working), I came up with a much better one that did work.

Mowers are moved & gas cans. Tomorrow is the heavy stuff: bags of gravel, sand, pack of shingles, 45 fire bricks, slabs of slate & some pavers. I have a pallet for most of it to sit on. Once I get it moved, I’ll post some before, between & after pics.

I will be ready to ‘celebrate’ on the 4th. I might try my hand at Omaha steak burgers on the 2nd hand grill I bought from a cousin & cleaned up :-)