Check out the Photos section for some amazing pictures of the boxes we packed this season. I did not get photos of them all but they were all great. I love working with such beautiful colorful plants. They never cease to amaze me.
August 16th
We finished the new hoop house a couple weeks ago. We will be harvesting some greens from within this structure early next spring and then transplanting tomato plants for extra early tomatoes. It’s a half a year away but our supply of frozen, canned and dried tomatoes should hold out until then.
It looks kinda fake, but I took a bite outta one of the radishes and they are real!
spring hoop house
In foreground: broccoli rabe, then Hakurei salad turnips, then beets. These Crops did great. We are still harvesting beets and broccoli rabe but the turnips are gone and the space has been replanted to tomatoes.
The woods are alive with the sound of dripping as the maple trees fill up the buckets with cool sweet tree sap or Ent Draught as I like to call it. The weather has been perfect the past few days and we plan to boil some down to sugary syrup today. We also use this pure water to make tea and drink it straight up.
they're up!
The first seeds of the season were planted a couple weeks ago in the smaller hoophouse and are just starting to poke through the surface. This hoophouse is unheated and will drop down well below zero Celsius at night. These radishes don’t seem to mind the cold and in a little over a month these radishes will be ready to harvest and will be the sweetest around.
The new hoophouse got its plastic poly covering a couple weeks ago when we had a nice warm calm day. The soil has been warming up and drying out over the past couple weeks and is almost ready to be worked. We will hopefully get in there within the next week or so to add compost to the soil and to prep the beds for planting. I have transplants of beets and broccoli raab that will be ready to go in here in a couple weeks. I will also plant some salad turnip seed and seed for some other greens in here. Check back to see the progress and greening of the inside of this structure.
It is big.
This past Sunday I took the first cuttings of the year. Hopefully, these cuttings will sprout roots and grow into healthy herb plants. These stem cuttings are stripped of excess leaves and then placed into plastic plug trays. The trays are then fitted with a plastic lid that allows light in and traps moisture inside. Keeping a very humid environment is crucial while the plants are still forming roots. The trays are then placed on my grow racks with a heating pad underneath them. The heat helps to speed up the wound healing/callusing of the cuttings and also in helping to form new roots. I recently purchased a digital control box that allows me to control the exact temperature of the heating pad. Rosemary can take a couple weeks before it starts to grow roots whereas pineapple sage can start to grow new roots in just a few days.
Seasonable temps and occasional sunshine certainly help make this month bearable and with the right hobbies it can be quite enjoyable, namely cooking, eating and soaking up the sun inside a hoophouse
Hello Everyone,
I just got this new website format through wordpress and I will be working on building it in the months ahead. There is a lot of planning going on here at the farm. During these cold months I have time to go over last years successes and failures and research new ways of doing things. I also have time to listen to conference lectures on tape and I even have time to attend a few in person. I have been attending the Midwest Organic Farming Conference for the past seven years and find it very educational as well as a way to connect with other farmers and farming resources and supplies. What I am most thrilled about though is having this time to be able to cook a proper breakfast, lunch and dinner and I am savoring every moment of it. All the effort that went into freezing, drying, fermenting and canning was sooo worth it. Hope you all are enjoying what the season has to offer and are eating well.
