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 […]
Partial To-Do list for this weekend
It’s going to be chilly this weekend, and Sunday it is going to rain. But we’re moving forward! Today we drove up from the city and stopped at Home Depot on the way. Everything we bought there looked cheap and poorly made, though I am not sure these tools are actually worse quality than what […]
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 […]
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, […]
Another resource for finding a farmer
We’ve been getting a lot of great farmer candidates just by word of mouth. Someone just gave a suggestion for us to check out Sustainable Food Jobs. They are creating a database of, well… sustainable food jobs, so that people no longer have to slog through general non profit sites or gardening websites. It’s a […]
average temperatures, precipitation, etc & planting calendar
We are still fleshing out the planting calendar, but we’re very far along (we have the plant dates down, anyway, which is the part we need to worry about first). Most planting directions are given in terms of weeks before/after frost date. A few say things like “when the temperature is a reliable 60.” I […]
