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. 

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...

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!

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!

Winter Fun at the Farm

After 2 weeks of passing the flu around, we're finally all feeling better.  In fact, we felt good enough to spend 4 hours sledding at the farm.  I can't remember when we've had this much fun!  We took advantage of the newly-resculpted hill behind the greenhouse and managed to construct a sledding hill about 300 ft long and FAST! 

Jacob and Jeremy sledding down together

Look how far they went!

Catherine snacking on some snow

 

It was wonderful to make some fun memories at the farm and to spend some time outside after so much time feeling sick.  If we're really lucky, we'll get to sled some more before all the snow melts.