It's almost here!

The promise is 2"-3" of glorious rain over the next 3 days, which would be awesome! The plants are looking pretty good, but they would sure look much fuller and grow bigger with some rain. There's nothing like it to soak the soil good.

The ground was tilled today and fertilized with some alfalfa based organic fertilizer so we're ready for the rain to wash it all in and get cooking. Then we'll come back and bed up the soil so we can plant the warm season produce.

Larry and Farmer Jack - lots of wisdom shared today

We're looking at a LOT more space needed as melons, cucumbers, squash and such take up a lot of room, spreading out those runners all over the place. (for those of you who want to try it, I see mags showing folks growing some things as big as watermelon up a trellis with queen size panty hose to hold the melons up.) And we're looking to put in eggplant, one of my summer favorites, and of course, tomatoes. Everyone's summertime favorite.

We're going to cool off again though, as usual, for this weekend - and probably have one more snap of cool before ol' man winter finally lets go. So it is a bit too early to get those warm season things in the ground. The rain that comes this weekend will cool that soil off again and putting warm soil loving plants into cold soil spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E as Travis Tritt would say. Yeah, some years you can get away with it - and some years you set yourself up for a buggy disease disaster. We'll play it safe....

We should see chard regrowing slowly but surely, the lettuces are pretty and we should have 2 more of those heirloom varieties to try I think this weekend, the mesculin will be getting another cutting, another variety of pok choi is just about ready, and we'l see if we can get some spinach, and beets, along with our herbs, too. The cauliflower just doesn't look good. I asked ol' Jack today what the thought it was and he wasn't even sure. I suspect it just didn't get enough of what it likes early on - it is a pretty picky plant sometimes. Drats.

We had a very nice variety in our first winter harvest.

Kathryn, one of our CSA members, brought some of her students out today for a tour of the farm. They are in an environmental science class. We discussed some basics of soil, the renewable energy system, what crops were in and what we were planning to plant and the importance of preserving and establishing more small farms in and nearby urban areas and how CSA was an important component to that. I gave them handouts on NAIS, which we should've covered more in depth, the renewable energy set up CSA member Herb and volunteer Leo have engineered for us, and on the history of Community Supported Agriculture as pioneered by Robyn Van En.

Everyone was greeted by Chief, who I was keeping up past his bed time, which is dusk if you're a rooster, and Shelby the barn cat. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to get to share my passion about farming and local healthy food with young people - who may one day get excited enough about local food and want to farm, too! Hey, you never know?!

Marie
Eat Your Food - Naturally!