New year begins on the farm

I don't care what the calendar says, the year doesn't start on the farm until the first seeds go in the ground.  That started last weekend with the first round of onion seed getting planted in flats for (eventual) transplanting into garden beds.  The first of them are just now starting to poke their heads up.

Onions sprouting!

Currently, I have 5 flats of onions planted and 2 flats of various herbs (thyme, lavender, stevia, yarrow and parsley).  As soon as the seed arrives, I'll have another flat of herbs to plant (oregano, wormwood and a couple of other things).  Here in another couple of weeks I'll start the coles (cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower).  It is wonderful to have veggies growing already!  There's a little bit of spring in our living room now.  :D

Seed stand and lights

On the goat front, we traded bucks with some country neighbors who also have la mancha dairy goats.  The loaner buck, Bucky, has successfully accomplished his mission despite a less than auspicious beginning. 

Upon meeting their new boyfriend, the girls unanimously ask, "Who is this guy?!?!" 

The girls spent most of the first week or so running away from him.  Luckily he was predictably persistent and they eventually decided he wasn't so bad after all.  LOL.  We are expecting baby goats sometime in April or early May.

I don't have pictures of it, but we have been busy recently cutting firewood and getting practice splitting wood.  It has been nice to have some not-quite-frigid days to be out in the winter sunshine.  We hope to do a little lumber milling in the next couple of weeks also.  There's a nice downed oak tree in our woods that looks straight enough to make nice timbers, so we're going to give it a shot. 

In preparation for winter, we assembled a section of our second hoop house over the house slab.  It makes a nice, mostly wind free, space that stays a bit warmer than outside.  It should let us work when it isn't completely frigid out this winter and it will let us leave the work out once we get started.  That will save a ton of time spent uncovering and re-covering the timbers. 

Hoop house over the slab

I have yet to do the final tally of garden produce, but I think ended up close to 1000 lbs.  The bio-char trial definitely proved that the char made for healthier plants and higher yields in our tomato trials.  It didn't seem to make a difference for the dry beans we grew or the cabbage and broccoli.  It also didn't hurt either of those crops, so over all it seems to be a beneficial treatment.  We plant to use the remainder of the char we bought last year on our tomato beds for this year and we will likely purchase more to add to our remaining garden beds.

On tap for this Spring's projects (other than the house, of course) are some re-working of our catchment swales by the garden, creating a mini-chinampas bed for watermelon, finishing the grape swales and planting the grapes and (finally!) getting the front hedge row planted.  It will be another busy year for us, but at this point we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves if it wasn't! 

Timber Framing and spring gardening!

As the weather has warmed up, we've definitely gotten more active!  We've been hard at work on the cabin of late.  First, we moved all the timbers up from the hoop house to the building site.  This lets us use the nice flat, level pad as a work space and gets everything close to where it will end up.  We were very fortunate to have a friend, Jeff Bloss, come help!

Jeremy and Jeff on one of the completed timber stacks

Then we started doing the lay ups.  A lay up is where you precisely position every part of a plane of the building and then very precisely scribe all the joints where they belong.  This ensures that everything will (theoretically) fit together just right when we go to assemble it.  So far, we've gotten one of the East-West planes done and one of the North-South planes.  That leaves 8 more planes to complete.  Fortunately, only one of those needs to be done before we can get back to joinery for a while. 

One plane set and time to begin scribing

Other than requiring lots of unique steps, timber framing also requires some unique tools!  Jeremy has been hard at work making 2 custom hammers - one smaller one for chiseling and one large one (called a beetle) for "persuading" timbers into the right place.  This one is BIG!  The square in the picture is 12" on a side for some scale.

The BIG one...otherwise known as a Beetle

But wait!  That isn't all we've been doing!  We also planted about 400 onions and 3 beds of potatoes.  Our tomatoes, peppers, herbs and okra are growing nicely and getting almost ready for transplant into their own pots.  The cabbage and broccoli are doing well in their pots on the balcony despite the cold snap and we have a host of sweet potato slips growing.  It's feeling like garden season around here!

Onion starts along the fence

Tomatoes and peppers growing happily

Sweet potatoes and cabbage

Jeremy has been adding soil from the topsoil pile to some of the beds that didn't get enough last year so that they'll be ready to plant.  We've also signed up for a pilot study of biochar in garden soil.  We will have 3 different test crops (tomatoes, potatoes and cabbage) that we are planning to divide into the following test groups:  control (no additions), compost & minerals (we will add compost and a sea solids solution), biochar with compost and minerals, and a half dose of the mineral and biochar.  With these we hope to demonstrate what effect each component has on the overall growth and productivity of the plants in the beds.  We plan to post updates on here as things grow, so keep your fingers crossed that we manage to keep track of this while building a house this summer!

We have some joyous and some sad news to share.  First the good news!  Our future goat, Peaches, gave birth to 3 beautiful daughters about a week ago.  The girls are healthy and active and positively adorable!  The bad news is that Peaches did not survive the process.  Triplets are really hard on a goat (twins are the norm), especially a yearling, and these 3 were all tied up on the way out.  She survived long enough to provide colostrum for the babies and then passed.  She was a very sweet animal and we will think of her every time we look at her wonderful daughters.

Peaches' three daughters curled up for a nap

The last thing going on right now is that we will have to recover our hoop house in the very near future.  For those of you that don't know, we had 2 large rips in the white plastic cover show up last October requiring a midnight recover of the hoop house with the old plastic we took off of it at its old home.  Luckily we kept the plastic or everything in the hoop house would have been ruined.  Sadly, the old plastic is...well...old, and isn't going to last much longer.  We have been trying to nurse it along until warmer weather, but its about done.  After repairing with duck tape, gaffers tape, epoxy and super glue, we have resorted to this contraption to hold it in place for a few more days.

Epoxy and strapping...not a long term solution!

This means that one of the days this weekend will be spent covering the greenhouse again.  Luckily, we have new plastic on hand so hopefully it will all go much more smoothly than last time!  If nothing else, we've had some practice.

Ok, I think that catches us up!  Hope you're enjoying your spring!

Of bales, grass and fences

Sunday was another productive, although shorter, day at the farm.  Jacob and I managed to stack bales along the lowest of the swales behind the greenhouse.  They should form a good wall to catch any topsoil that tries to wash down the hill before the grass we planted comes in.  I have to say that after all the work we did on Saturday, we were moving pretty slow!  Catherine joined in by starting to spread hay on the area behind the greenhouse.  Have I mentioned how much I love my kids?

The bales and mulch behind the greenhouse.

When Jeremy arrived, he and I put in the 8' T-posts that complete the post part of the garden fence.  It's really starting to look fence-like now! 

Its starting to look like a fence...and Daisy got a photo op.  :D

 

While we did that, the kids continued spreading straw where we had planted grass.  The plan was for them to continue that while Jeremy and I strung wire for the fence.  Unfortunately, we realized that the fence staples were still at home.  So much for that idea!  So instead, we all spread straw out on the slopes around the garden spot.  We really don't want to leave this ground bare any longer than we have to because of the risk of erosion.  We're hoping that with the straw shading the soil and the moist week we're looking to have, the grass will go ahead and come up.  There are some small spots where we can already see some blades poking through and the clover in the garden is coming up in several places.  With a little luck (and rain), the area will look lush and green before the heat of summer kicks in.

The west slope around the garden covered in straw.

 

The rest of Sunday was spent resting and taking care of things at home (laundry still doesn't do itself, I'm sad to report).  A wonderful end to a wonderful weekend!

Asparagus and Blackberries

For some minor catch up, Jeremy spent time this week finishing off the poles for the garden fence.  He did some very nice chainsaw work to notch some neat arches over the future gates and he put in solid braces at all the corners and gate posts.  We'll be ready to string wire soon!

Today was another glorious spring day and we spent it moving our blackberries and some of the asparagus out to the farm.  The aparagus was quite the chore.  After digging for over 2 hours, I finally had to admit defeat.  Prying one of these 7 year old crowns out of the asparagus bed needed someone with more weight on the shovel!  The kids and I switched our attention to the blackberry canes growing in our front yard.  It only took a little while to dig them up.  Between those and the ones that we started from cuttings last year, we ended up with 23 plants!

Shortly after digging the blackberries, my brother came by.  He graciously offered to help pry the 2 asparagus crowns I'd been working on out of the ground and we had them in a tub for transplanting in a jiffy.  When Jeremy came home, we made short work of the other 2 crowns in that row.

Then we loaded all the asparagus starts in the greenhouse, the ones we'd dug up and all the blackberries up into the Ford to take to the farm.  It was a bed full of plants!  The asparagus went in first.  We alternated small starts from the greenhouse with the larger mature crowns.  In total, we had 16 asparagus plants. 

The mass of roots in the middle of the hole is one of the mature crowns being planted.

 

Planting asparagus - you can see the green fronds of the greenhouse grown asparagus in the foreground - they're about a month ahead of the others.

 

Next, we turned our attention to the blackberries.  These will be growing along the west fence around the garden to form a living screen from the road.  We started by loosening the soil in a line where the fence will be.  Next, we added a top dressing of topsoil from the soil mountain and last, we planted the blackberries.  The 23 plants will quadruple the number we had in town if they all survive.  I can't wait!

Jeremy breaking up the row while I planted blackberries.

 

 

Watering in the blackberries.  Check out the future gate!

 

There was lots of watering in to do with the 3 vegetable beds, the entire bed in front of the greenhouse and the blackberry row.  I suspect we will be spending quality time with the garden hose over the next several months.

On another positive note, it looks like all but 2 of our fruit trees survived the winter.  Several are already budding out!  I'm so excited to have those trees already planted and growing.  In another year or two, we'll have our own fruit!

Stay tuned - the warmer weather means much will be happening!

Potatoes and onions are in!

For those in Kansas, you know that we had one of the most beautiful spring weekends we’ve seen in quite a while this past weekend.  We celebrated by spending all day Sunday at the farm working on the garden.  First though, here is a picture of the swales we created a couple of weeks ago:

3 swales on contour

The kids and I (Jeremy was at work) started the day by marking out 3 new beds to build.  These are 4’x20’ garden beds.  Then we started hauling dirt up from the dirt mountain to create the raised bed.  Have I mentioned how in love I am with this soil?  It’s wonderful, black, crumbly stuff – a gardener’s dream.  In the picture below, you can see where we’ve started the first of the 3 beds.

3 beds laid out, dirt started for first one.  You can see the kids loading the next wheel barrow in the background.

We planted almost all of these plus 70 seed potatoes!

Naturally, the batteries in the camera died after this picture, so I don’t have pictures of the rest of what we did…

Once the first bed was created, we planted about 80 cabbage and broccoli plants and covered them with an insect barrier.  We’ve found that it’s the only way to keep the cabbage worms off of the plants so that we get a reasonable harvest.  We still have more cabbage and cauliflower to plant, but that will have to wait until we can get more insect barrier.

The second bed was planted with about 400 onions.  We still have leeks to plant, but otherwise all the onions are in for this year.  The third bed got 40 hills of potatoes with the remainder of our onions planted on the borders.  We have another 30 hills of potatoes planted in the bed in front of the hoop house.

With a little luck and some good weather, we’ll be back at the farm this week to work on the fence and build another bed to hold the rest of the cabbage/cauliflower and the leeks.  We need to get the fence up as soon as possible because we noticed deer tracks all over the fresh soil around the garden.  We also had our neighbor’s chickens and ducks with us for most of the day and prior experience says that when tasty little things start shooting up from the ground, they will get eaten.  Must get the fence done.  Quickly.  On the upside, there is very little in life that is more entertaining than watching chickens be chickens and the intermittent serenade of quacks from the ducks was nice.

Speaking of neighbors, when we got in the truck to go back home it wouldn’t start.  Didn’t even try to turn over.  Since the camera whose batteries died was my phone, we were basically stranded with no way to call anyone.  The only thing left to do was go next door and see if they could help.  Our truly amazing neighbor, Don Spradling, didn’t even hesitate.  He brought his truck over to try jumping ours and when that didn’t work, he started checking other things.  He discovered that we had a bad starter relay.  Luckily there are 3 identical relays in the box, so he switched it for another one and the truck started right up.  Thank God for good neighbors!  Needless to say, a new relay was purchased and installed this morning.  If Don hadn’t been there and known enough to check and swap the relays, we would have had to call a tow truck and pay a mechanic to find out that we needed a $15 relay.  We really can’t say thank you enough. 

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!

Maybe Next Year...

This year feels like it is caught in stasis somewhere around March for me.  I realize that we are actually in May and that the plants think we’re in mid-June, but for me all the normal cues of spring and summer are missing.  I don’t have a garden this year. 

I normally mark early spring with hundreds of plant starts in the living room.  Every morning before work, I go in and turn on their lights and inspect each one to make sure it’s healthy.  I pull up little sprouts of crabgrass that have come in with our home made compost mix.  Usually it’s still cold outside and as I bundle up for work, I look at my seedlings and know that spring is coming.  Those tiny plants create a bubbling sense of overwhelming joy inside me every morning.  I face the cold with an eager smile knowing that winter is losing its grip and the warmer weather is coming.  Slowly the weather warms and more seedlings get started until I have a seed starting stand and a greenhouse full of plants waiting on the right time to go in the garden.  Then comes the busy season of planting – hours spent joyfully digging in the dirt, mulching and otherwise being outside in the spring.  By this time of year, I should be transplanting tomatoes and peppers, marveling at the growth of green peas, potatoes, cabbage and spring greens.  We should be enjoying our first meals mostly from the garden and thinking about what we want to can, freeze and dehydrate this year.  Then comes the annual marker of summer – creamed peas and new potatoes straight from the garden.  This meal more than any other says that the beginning of summer is here.  We’ve eaten it with the first green peas of the season every year since the garden started.

There’s more than just the work and fun of the garden that is missing though.  I would usually be working to organize the Lawrence Food Garden Tour (www.facebook.com/lawrencefoodgardentour).  This too starts in the cold weather of early spring with the first emails out to past participants.  This time of year, there would be a growing urgency to getting things organized – getting the brochure printed, the event posted, all the gardens lined up and ready to go. 

My conversations with friends take on a new flavor in the spring and summer too.  Our talks would be laced with “What have you been planting?”, “How are your plants growing?”, “Have anything new this year?”.  These conversations with others who are doing the same work but often doing it differently encourage us, give us new ideas, and help to bind these gardening relationships together.  It is like living a friendly experiment – these friends are trying this new method/variety/plant and we are trying these others.  We’ll check in over the season and see how it goes and then next year we can all use the best of what we have collectively found.  

Instead of these normal markers of spring and summer, we are moving.  I am not planting in my garden, I am digging it up and moving it 20 miles away.  Instead of starting seeds this spring, I removed wall paper and painted to get the house ready to sell.  There are no spring crops beyond the few lettuce plants that volunteered and some leeks that overwintered.  I didn’t start any seedlings this year (ok, I started a couple of tomatoes…couldn’t help it).  There was no seed stand in my living room at all.  Instead of a greenhouse full of tomatoes and peppers waiting for their chance in the garden, I have a greenhouse full of plants waiting for me to make a place for them on the farm.  There are no green peas or potatoes so our beginning of summer meal won’t happen this year.  There won’t be any canning for me this season.  Even if we planted summer vegetables, I don’t know that I will have anywhere to store food come winter.  I am not organizing the LFGT this year – Caryl Hale has generously taken it on and is doing a great job.  I miss it though.  I’m not having my usual talks with gardening friends.  As they share what is happening in their gardens, I can only respond with “Maybe I’ll try that next year.” 

It feels like I’ve lost a friend.  My senses are waiting for the seed stand to come back, for the little seeds to poke up out of the soil and show me that its spring even though it’s now firmly summer.  The fact that I had the first sweet cherry off of our sweet cherry tree hasn’t even convinced my subconscious that it is in fact summer (neither did the awesome sunburn I got this weekend while moving dirt to the farm).  The rhythm of the year is just off for me. 

It’s not all bad.  I’m sure that I will write about all the excitement of building a new place, the plans for the garden-to-be and all the many things that we are doing to create our future place.  Not to mention the plans for next year’s garden.  But right now, in this moment, with the rain coming down and the urge to plant burning up inside me, the excitement is buried in melancholy.  I want my garden back.  Summer just isn’t supposed to come without the seeds, the plants and the creamed peas and potatoes.  But it has.  Summer is here and my garden is not.  I suppose my only consolation is the perennial garden refrain “Maybe next year.”  Maybe next year the garden will be back better than ever.  Maybe next year the seeds will be back on the starting stand, the plants will be waiting for the garden and we’ll have our creamed peas and potatoes.  I hope so.