Monday, March 18, 2013

Swales and seeds

What a wonderful day at the farm!  The only down side was that we forgot the camera and the battery on my phone was dead, so no pictures right now.  Next time we go to the farm, I'll try to catch up with pics of some of what we did today.

We started out by moving a stack of large pallets out to the farm.  We gave one to the kids to disassemble for the long boards in it, turned 4 of them into a compost bin and stacked up the other 4 to use under the next load of milled lumber.  Once the kids had disassembled the pallet, we turned the 3 long boards into a landscape compass.  If you have never seen one of those, it looks like a 6' tall letter A with a 5' spread at the bottom.  The cross piece of the A is exactly level.  This allows us to find a level contour line on the hillsides by putting a 4' level on the cross piece and then moving the compass until the 3 feet are level with each other.

Once the compass was built, we used it to make 3 level contour lines on the hillside behind the hoop house.  Next, I worked on digging out the first swale following the contour lines while Jeremy seeded grass onto the other bare ground around the hoop house and garden.  When he finished seeding, he helped me finish out the other 2 swales.

The 3 swales are about 120 ft. long.  The plan is to construct grape trellises along the swales then move our grapes, raspberries and blackberries to the farm.  Ideally, they should move before they break their winter sleep.  That gives us somewhere between 2 weeks and a month.  In reality, as long as they get moved before the hot and dry part of summer hits, we should be ok.  Here's hoping!

Our last project at the farm today was putting dirt on the edges of the plastic on the hoop house.  We have tried an assortment of things to keep the plastic from pulling up in places and none have quite worked like we wanted.  This one looks promising though. 

When we got back home, I spent an hour or so getting the grape clippings dipped in rooting powder and put in dirt.  With a bit of luck, we'll get enough of them to take to fill up the swales we just built!

What a wonderful day!  If only I didn't have to go back to work tomorrow...

Sunday, March 17, 2013

A transplanting we will go...

Today was the second big transplanting day for my future garden plants.  In about 3 hours, Catherine and I managed to transplant about 140 plants from their nursery trays into individual pots.  The greenhouse now looks much more green...

Eggplant, peppers and tomatoes on the back bench


We followed that up with a trip to a friend of mine's near Topeka where we had a wonderful visit and picked up some grape prunings.  With a little luck, some of these little brown sticks will become grape vines for the farm!  There are 5 different varieties of wine grapes (one in each bucket) to go witih the 5 varieties of table grapes we have growing at our house in town right now. 

Buckets of grape clippings


We hope to work on the rows for these and on the garden tomorrow and over the rest of the week.  Stay tuned to see how we do!

Friday, March 15, 2013

Goings on all around

For anyone that doesn't live around here, we had a bit of snow a couple of weeks ago...as in about 20 inches of it!  Naturally that did not lend itself to working on the farm, so I took advantage of the time to finish up a different set of projects. 



The 3 rugs on the left were sold at a craft fair to help Catherine's 4H group.  The other one is in use at home now.  We managed to make it almost all the way through the denim strips we already have cut.  I still have an entire tub of jeans that I haven't cut up yet, so I imagine there will be more denim somethings in my future!

On the farm front, I have started potting up tomatoes and peppers.  Its looking like I'll have some extras if anyone in our area is looking for a few plants.  It feels wonderful to finally be in the dirt again.  We're hoping to make it to the farm this weekend to do some more work on the garden and maybe get our potatoes and onions planted.

In the spirit of catching up, we will be building a small outbuilding when the weather is warm enough to do concrete.  It will be uphill of the house spot and will give us a place to put our building supplies.  We were fortunate that my new employer, Amarr Garage Doors, was selling insulated garage door panels to its employees for a song, so the barn will be sided and roofed with them.  Convenient steel siding that's pre-insulated!  Who could ask for more?  It'll only take 50 of them to do it...

I think that's the gist of what we've been up to.  Thanks for keeping up and check back!