Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Here we go!

Well, it's hit! We've had a couple of weeks of warm dry weather, and we are going full tilt. Tilling, bed prepping, and planting. We'll include some pictures, but I must say our transplants generally look better than they have in past years. This is most likely due to the light there receiving in our new greenhouse. Last year we had them in our living room, looking starved and spindly. They are probably also helped by the afalfa meal and soybean meal we added to our soil block mix, something we didn't do last year.

Today, we spent all day planting onions, broccoli, parsnips and carrots. It felt great to be out in the field working hard.

Yesterday, I broke the manure spreader(it's a trailor with a conveyor belt along the bottom, and spinning paddles at the back that fling the contents out the back) when I was using it to haul compost over to the field. It's an old piece of farm equipment that's been sitting behind one of the barns for many years. With the help of Kevin and Carole, our neighbours, we hooked it up to the tractor, and voila, it still worked!.....for a couple of hours. I(Luke) tried to do something stupid with it, and snapped a couple of old chain links while it was unloading. Then we had to get in to unload it with a shovel, and I fell through one of the floor boards. Must be all the winter weight I put on.
So, we're going to get some new parts, and try to fix it, as it is quite a handy piece of machinery. It'll be especially handy for spreading compost on our new field that we'll be expanding to next year.

Earth day also came and went. The local chapter(of which Mike is the chair) of the Conservation Council of New Brunswick organized a town clean up, a potluck, and a hike. I got out to the clean up and the potluck; both we're great. Sounds like the hike was beautiful as well.

Hopefully our blog posts don't get too choppy and spread out as the busy season gets busier. I'll try to stay on top of it.

Lastly, I'm not sure if it's been mentioned on here, but all 50 of this year's CSA shares have been filled! It's really great to be in a community with so many people that are interested in what we're doing. We haven't hardly advertised.

Happy Belated Earth Day, everyone!

Friday, April 04, 2008

A few pics of our Greenhouse in operation, some Garlic poking up through the soil and our new homemade garden cart.