green manure + more row covers
A green manure is a plant that you grow with the intention of letting it bring up nutrients from deep within the soil (or if it is a nitrogen fixer, of also collecting nitrogen from the air+soil) and then killing it. You turn it into the soil to build organic matter and make its nutrients […]
sheet mulch
We still haven’t managed to make contact with our neighbor with a plow (in spite of a lovely two-people-on-one-bike trip around the neighborhood where we met a lot of other nice people), but we have a lot of hungry sprouts, so we’ve started expanding the existing garden beds. Lewis had a giant piece of nice […]
Organizing the tools…
(I know it’s Monday, but this post is about Sunday 3/21) Working with Anna this weekend, and working on multiple projects over a short period of time, really made it clear that we need to keep everything organized. The planting equipment was in 4 different places, plus “regular” tools were somewhere else. Today we took […]
Soil blocks, looking for rocks, buying a car… and more!
That’s just a preview – so much happened today that we’re going to break it up into several posts. Today Anna and I made more soil blocks. We’re really getting good at getting making them (right amount of water, enough dirt so they are consistent size, etc). Ground cherries, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi, spinach, and kale […]
Planting out
Today it was 70 degrees out and not raining! A perfect day to take some of our too-early seedlings outside. They are pretty tall and spindly because they weren’t getting enough sun (we tried our best – we have a couple of lights on timers pointed at them, but they aren’t “real” growlights or anything). […]
Row cover materials came
I’ve been ordering most of our supplies from Johnny’s Seeds in Vermont. The row cover materials arrived this week, so we should be able to put out our we-were-really-excited-and-started-too-early sprouts next weekend. It should be just warm enough (this row cover protects down to 28 degrees and lets in 85% of the light). It has […]
Recieved the rest of our seeds
Our Fedco Seeds order arrived this week. Between this and Lewis’ order we have about 20x more seeds than we need. Ha ha ha. We also have seeds left over from last year – Fedco, Baker Creek Heirloom, and some from a seedswap with our friend Molly. Here’s our Fedco order: 989CO-Crimson Sweet Watermelon OG […]
knowing what to buy
It seems pretty obvious that in order to be a successful farmer you need to buy as little as possible. It is also important that you have the correct (and most well-made) tools you need to get the job done – multiple farmers have stressed the importance of this to us. We’re just starting out, […]
No more snow!
It was 61 in the “greenhouse” today when I got here. Our germination rates are close to 100% for just about everything. There are only a few patches of snow left outside, and I’ve discovered a lot of soggy places. Barring another big snow storm in the next 2 weeks (not expected) we should have […]
