Mulching, wildflowers, and corn
This weekend has been busy and great! Friday we drove up from the city with Anna (new grower!!!) and Abby, a friend who is going to be extra help at harvest time and who hadn’t been out to see the farm yet. This morning we were joined by our friend Liz as well. We spent […]
observations so far about our seedling/planting process
The eggplant we seeded in the miniblockers must not have been deep enough, because over half of them managed to pop their roots entirely out of the ground. It was pretty horrifying to see their naked white roots just lying ON TOP of the soil like that. I noticed right away and only 2 of […]
deer fence posts – and the one person post hole digger
HEAVY equipment… hardly, but who would have thought that operating a power tool would be so tiring. this thing was kinda nuts, but it was way better than banging a digging bar into the ground. i drove to home depot this morning – something i fear that i will have to do many more times […]
Sproutocalypse
Friday night it was 19 degrees out. Today I went and checked on the broccoli, cabbage, and tatsoi we planted under row covers last week. The good news is that their leaves were all green and happy looking. The bad news is that their stems were all shriveled and weird. If you add those two […]
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 […]
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 […]
"freezing temperatures"; "danger of frost"
After planting seeds last weekend I’ve been thinking a lot about how well they’ll do after we transfer them outside (under protection). I am honestly not an expert on when and how frost forms or which plants can survive (or benefit!) from freezing temperature and which don’t… Here’s some info on why frost forms (yes, […]
Frost dates
Cornell has a very useful map of frost dates by county. For where we are it’s April 20-30th. For NYC it’s around April 14th.
