Exciting Stuff!!!!

Hello Everyone,

Despite the fact that it is STILL Winter, we are managing to remain entertained and somewhat busy.
The guys have done THE BEST basement clean up this house has ever seen. We have been on the search for the best set up down there as we use it all throughout the season. In the spring we make our soilblocks(see last post) down there, then in summer and fall we use it to clean and package all our veggies. Like a New Year's resolution, we've made valiant efforts to keep the basement clean but slowly let it slip as we got busier and busier, but this time, it's gonna be different!

Christmas came late this year to BBF, when Mike went to pick up a bunch of items we ordered! It was very exciting to see our new Salad Spinner which holds 5 gallons of leafy greens. Talk about speeding up the salad process!!! We also received some serious amounts of slitted row covers and floating row covers. What's the difference? Slitted row covers allow us to give a bit of extra heat to our plants whereas the floating row covers are more often used to protect our plants from those pesky insects that try to gobble up our veggies(eg. Cucumber beetles and flea beetles). Mike, as our watering captain, bought a water timer(so we can set a time when the water will turn on and off! This is going to be our morning saviour as those early morning watering were somewhat dreadful last year) and a spray bottle to mist our transplants. We got a new bed rake which I am really stoked to use. It is super light and wide so bed prep will hopefully be much easier. Then there were a whole bunch of little tigglies like tomatoe clips, knives, etc that were pretty great too.
Also very exciting, we decided to use organic cotton cloth bags in our CSA to hold veggies like tomatoes, green beans, lettuce, etc. We found last year that we were just using too many plastic bags and weren't satisfied with that. We are also going to use non-toxic, biodegradable plastic bags at the market for now and see how that goes. Would you pay for a reusable cloth bag instead of a plastic bag at your local market?

This coming weekend is my(Katherine) birthday and the guys are up to something but I don't know quite what it is!!! They told me I have to leave for a good long walk. Bailey will be happy!
The following weekend is the ACORN conference that Mike and I went to two years ago. This year some of our friends are part of the workshops so that's pretty exciting. Maybe next year we'll be part of a workshop! It's a pretty nice conference but like most conferences the best part is just seeing old faces, new faces and funny faces! We learn so much just from talking to other growers that sometimes I think that's really why they put these events together!!!

So far we have had a great response for our CSA. Roughly 25 people have signed up and it's only been 2 weeks since we've advertised it. Almost all of last year's members have signed up so that's pretty great. Have any of you ever gone to a farm event? Would you recommend any such fun event to us for our members?

Lastly and probably most importantly, Luke and I accomplished a long awaited task this week. We made the happiest snow fort ever,complete with secret snowball compartments. We then proceeded to ambush Mike when he came home from picking up all our packages!!! He was not expecting it at all but we suspect he's planning his retort quietly and mischievously.

Hope you are all well and keeping the fire in your hearts a burnin'

Yours truly,
Katherine