Gildrien Farm

July is plowing right along. We've had a pretty good mix of sun and rain and most things are growing like crazy. We ought to be picking cukes, zukes and green beans every day, but three times a week is about all we can manage. We haven't had enough sunny, dry days to get ahead of the weeds, and they've been growing just as fast as everything else, so every sunny, dry day is spent weeding. Harvest and wash for CSA and market takes most of the day on Friday now. This week we added potatoes to the mix.

New potatoes are one of the reasons I love farming. They were really a revelation for me. I think that everyone knows - at least theoretically - that a fresh, sun-warmed, garden tomato is fundamentally different from the tomatoes you get at the grocery store. What most people don't know - what I didn't know until only a few years ago - is that a fresh, just-dug baby potato is a fundamentally different vegetable than the big old russets (or even the pretty-good red-skinned ones) you get at the store. They're so creamy and soft and tender and full of good flavor. Potatoes are one of my favorite things to eat and one of my favorite things to grow. They don't take much care, just basic weeding and a hilling once or twice, and they grow all big and bushy, then you dig them up and surprise! There's potatoes in there! It's like magic every time.

Besides, potatoes, what else is new? The younger chickens have just started laying, so we get a little blue pullet egg every other day or so (a pullet is a young hen). When chickens first start laying, it takes them a few tries to get it right, so the first eggs tend to be a bit funny - often they're very small, grape-sized or even smaller, sometimes without yolks. Sometimes they don't get their hard shell on and are just enclosed in the inner membrane. Sometimes they have two yolks, or only yolk and no white. They're an adventure. After another few weeks the pullets should have it all worked out and we ought to be getting four or five good blue eggs in addition to the 8-10 that the other fourteen hens lay each day. Which will be good, because our household eats 6-8 eggs a day, and we haven't had as many to sell as we'd like.

The new chickens also seem to have integrated into the flock better now that they're full-sized and laying. They mostly roost all together now, although one still insists on roosting on the coop's hipboard rather than on the roost. I suspect that when winter comes she'll join the flock.

Also, the cherry tomato plants in the greenhouse have reached the top of their trellis (which is about 7 feet high), and Jeremy has doubled them over and trained them back down, and they have now reached my waist on their way down to the ground.

Wow, it's hard to find the time to blog!

Things are going well on the farm. The Japanese beetles have made their first appearance, right in sync with the black raspberries ripening. (Our black raspberry bush is very small and provides us with one tiny handful of raspberries every few days during the season... but it's a delicious tiny handful!) Pests haven't been that bad this year, so far (knock on wood) but it's early yet.

The magic December-planted carrots from the greenhouse are all done now, and the greenhouse is firmly in the grip of summer plants: eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes which are growing several inches a day. The cherry tomato plants are taller than I am! We've got a few just starting to turn color, so hopefully the rest will follow suit and soon we'll have tomatoes for the CSA and market.

We're starting to plan for this winter now, making sure we've got all the fall crops planted and figuring out what will go in the greenhouse when the tomatoes are done. We're planning to build a second greenhouse this fall, so we have to figure out the timing of that and what to plant when to fill it up. There's garlic now where that greenhouse is going, but that will be coming out fairly soon. Probably we'll plant some late brassicas and spinach there, then build the greenhouse over it, like we did with the first greenhouse last year. Maybe we'll plant more winter carrots! With two greenhouses, we should have the same problem of needing to plant the summer crops in before the winter crops are finished. Eventually, we'd love to have movable greenhouses... but that's for the future. Right now, we need to decide how much rutabaga seed to order!

Several items of interest this week:
1. New chickens! We got five new pullets to add to our laying flock. They're Ameracaunas, which are blue-egg birds. Gabe at Four Family Farm raised them until now, about ten weeks old, and we picked them up on Thursday. We fenced off a corner of the coop for them, and this morning I opened a little pop-hole in it that they can get in and out of but the big hens can't fit through. That way they have a safe place to go if the hens pick on them, and that's where their food is and roosts that are lower down. I raised up the hens' food so that the pullets shouldn't be able to reach it - their nutritional needs are different when they're growing from when they're laying, so we don't want them eating each others' food. I'm not sure how we'll manage when the pullets get to be full-size (probably July) but before they start to lay (sometime in August), but we'll figure something out. This set-up should hold us for a while.

2. We've started harvesting! We harvested more than ten pounds of spinach out of the greenhouse last week, most of which we sold to local restaurants. We've also started pulling radishes, but they're still pretty small and just snacks while we're working in the greenhouse. The scallions should be ready in time for market (which starts May 9!), and it looks like we should have carrots in time for CSA.

3. The field has been harrowed! We plowed a new piece of ground last fall and have been anxiously waiting for it to dry out enough to harrow, which finally happened this week. Of course, it's raining again now. Hopefully, we'll get a stretch of dry weather soon so we can till and plant.

4. We made the front page! Neighborly CSA was featured on the front page of last Thursday's Addison Independent! If you have an online subscription, you can read it on their website, or click here to download a PDF that we scanned. It's a pretty great article!

Shorts, sandals, and a tank top - what month is this, anyway? It was in the 80s today at the farm, and I spent the day pulling the mulch off the garlic. The "weed-free seed-free" rye straw that we mulched with ended up being neither of those things, so I also spent the day weeding the garlic. I might be a little sunburned, but it was great to be outside in the sun.

Two weeks ago, it got down to six degrees overnight. I was a little worried about the spinach, carrots, peas, and onions growing in the greenhouse. When Jeremy went out early in the morning, everything was frozen solid, but by 10 it had all thawed out and looked great - just like it's supposed to do! Pretty exciting. We've started tentatively harvesting the spinach, and the carrots are getting bigger by the day. Horray for spring!

You can see some more photos from today over on the photos page, under The Season Begins!

Spring is coming, guys. We ordered all our seeds a few weeks ago, and started seeding spinach this past weekend. The greenhouse is all prepped and waiting for those little soil blocks to sprout little spinach seedlings. Today we saw the first one break the surface of the soil, so once the rest of them poke their little cotyledons up they're going in the ground!

Out in the greenhouse now, the carrots we planted back in December are starting to come up. Wait, let me try that again: The carrots we planted WAY BACK in December are starting to COME UP! Now! Carrots! Growing! I'll confess to not being 100% confident that those carrots and spinach will do their thing, but I'm pretty excited to see how it goes.

Of course, outside of the greenhouse now is about two feet of snow, which all fell in the past 24 hours or so. I've shoveled it out twice so far and will probably need to do it again in the morning. I'm glad to have some snow, finally, but my back is not entirely happy about all the shoveling.

Still: Spring is definitely coming, and I've got the sprouts to prove it.

January and February are considered the down-times of farming in the north, and there certainly is a whole lot less work to be done outside. Folks with livestock still have to care for them, of course - we spend some time each day bedding down the chicken coop, collecting and washing eggs, making sure they have feed and water, and turning on and off their various heating devices. The greenhouse needs to be shoveled clear when it snows, but aside from that we've got very little garden work to do.

What do spend a lot of time on is planning. Jeremy and I are in the midst of a business planning class for farmers, put on by the UVM extension service and the VT Small Business Development Center. This past week we've been spending upwards of six hours a day working on the plan, which seems to be just as exhausting as six hours out in the field. But it'll be really good to have this done; lots of farms (and lots of businesses) don't start out with a solid business plan, and having to do all this work now should save us a lot of time and energy down the road.

Soon we'll be launching into planning our plantings for the year. Since we haven't been farming on our own for very long, and since this year we'll be using some new fields, this is likely to be a pretty long process as well. We have a good sense of proportions of crops based on previous experience, but the actual translation of those ideas into numbers of seeds to purchase will take some figuring. Then for each crop we need to know whether we'll be direct-seeding or transplanting, and when we need to plant the seed to have it ready at the right time. And, of course, we can only give our best guess as to when the best time will be -- last year I planted out all our tomatoes on Memorial Day weekend, which is the traditional last frost date for our area and which followed two weeks of mild weather, and - of course - we had a final light frost two days later, and we had to cover all the plants to keep them from getting bit.

The planting planning is actually a lot of fun, even if it does seem a little overwhelming at times. It's great to starting dreaming about tomatoes and compost and to imagine what our fields will look like all covered in plants. This time of year, everything still goes according to plan, and I can see a perfect season in my mind.

It's 17 degrees outside, there's about a foot of snow on the ground, and tonight we're going to be eating our own fresh kale and chard. It's amazing what a little cold frame can accomplish!