Showing posts with label pregnant cats. Show all posts

Peas, Asparagus, Potatoes!

Hello everyone, the season is rolling up quickly to speed! Everything is happening in a rush and way earlier than any of us could have predicted. The air is filled with bird song, the weather is warm, and we welcome the intermittent rainstorms and thunder that signifies that Spring is here.

Asparagus shoots are poking out of the ground, our planted sugar snap peas are climbing up toward the sky, and our babies we planted (it seemed only yesterday!) are large and harvestable any day now! Fresh pac choi, lettuce, and cilantro is on the way to Spring CSA shares and Grant Wood Farmer's Market. We walk through our fields of garlic and remove mulch so their green spears can reach the sun. Sizeable crops of beets and kale are on the way, and our new spinach seeds are sprouting for yet another round of delicious greens. Our tomatoes have been re-potted, they are getting large! Peppers and parsley have sprouted from their flats. Broccoli, basil, and eggplant have been recently seeded. Just today, we got an entire field of potatoes planted! We have a lot on the way!

Spring CSA begins soon! We will have that up and running on our Small Farm Central page. It will be announced in an upcoming newsletter when that happens, which will be soon. For now, visit our CSA Info page for details on that. We do have some CSA boxes available right now. Contact Derek Roller for a share!

Summer CSA season is still open for sign-up as well! Visit our CSA Sign-Up page.

Along with our veggie products, we have a few other projects well on the way. One small chicken tractor has been mostly completed, and a larger one for higher egg production on it's way to be done soon (hopefully! The frame is coming along.) Tomorrow, our future hog farmer Will is heading in to buy the hog panels we'll be using to keep our pigs. A first round of mushrooms has been inoculated! You can look forward to getting your hands on some of those!

We've had a lot of people out to visit, work, and volunteer! This week we have had Stella from Cornell College stay and help us work, she is staying with us until this Friday. She is an exchange student from China who is wanting to major in Environmental Studies. We're glad she wants to dig her hands in the soil with us! We hope she's having fun, and learning a lot. We have also had Lisa over from the quaint hamlet of Cedar Bluff along the river join our team to help us out on our big order days! We surely appreciate her help too!

Oh, and by the way....barn cat Macy is pregnant again. We can look forward to more kittens!

Hope you are all doing well! We've got a lot of juicy food to look forward to: fresh veggies, gourmet mushrooms, farm fresh chicken eggs....and pork! (Um, actually, we meat eating farmers here will be enjoying it...no meat CSA's. Sorry!)

Keep enjoying Spring while it's here!
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Blizzard....

2012 CSA signup is now underway! Email us for a share of the harvest this season!

Look it up online, watch the news, ask a meteorologist or talk to your local shaman....winter's first real blizzard is on it's way, and it's coming tonight! We expect 4-6 inches of snow.

Quite ironic that we spent most of yesterday, all the way up until the dusk's typically beautiful sunset, scrambling to get our cold-frame cats back up and working.

Today we had to take them down again. Our rough-and-tumble little portable greenhouses would collapse under the weight of that much snow. We had to resort to double-covering what was left of our crop with Reemay and plastic. We've chopped a lot of the growth off of some vegetables, such as kale and spinach, to make them go dormant for the winter, scrapping what we can use for more distribution and for our own consumption this winter. We'll see how much we can save and still use after this blizzard comes through...if it actually comes through at all, though the wind is whipping pretty hard outside right now.

Perhaps we're about to say "bye-bye" to this farmin'-in-T-shirts weather? It's been lovely still being able to walk around barefoot in our straw-bale home and extend the season as far as we have, but to be honest, a blizzard is more than welcome, ecologically speaking. There hasn't been much snow not only because it's been unusually mild, but also very unusually dry. The fact that the usual blanket of snow is absent right now is kinda worrisome. A healthy water-table level, important to nourishing both our farm and wild flora, depends on that persisting layer of snow to stick around, and slowly seep water back into the groundwater supply. If there's no snow this winter-- and if it is continuously dry-- that could mean some serious drought conditions this summer.

Our barn cat Macy could be pregnant again, she's a bit chubby-nubby, and kinda irritable. Her daughter Survivor can easily derail a workday, she is so precious and distracting. It is hard not to pick her up and tickle her!

Well, winter may mean the end of vegetable growing and harvesting, but it also means seed-starting is coming soon for our 2012 season. And living at a farm-- there is no end to the list of things that are needed to be done!

Grantwood Farmer's Market is still going. Come visit us next Saturday, Jan. 21st!
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