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.

Yes, the tomato plant is a foot taller than I am.

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!

Whew! Things are busy! We just finished the third farmers' market of the year, and this coming weekend is the start of our CSA! We've been tilling and seeding and transplanting away in our field in Salisbury, and we've opened up a new field in Middlebury, as well.

The land in Salisbury is pretty heavy clay, and it's been challenging to work with. We've spent a lot of time and sweat in the past few weeks moving about 20 yards of compost from piles along the edge of the field, into the pickup or wheelbarrows, and out onto the beds. This has improved the soil structure quite a lot, but it gets really cloddy if we work in it if it's even a little bit too wet. There's a smaller patch of land that we're using there as well, which had been a garden for a long time, and it's much more manageable. That's where all the potatoes are.

We've been proceeding slowly in the big field, preparing just what we need and waiting for the right conditions. But we've got cukes, zukes, winter squash and field tomatoes that are busting out of their soil blocks and they need a home now. So we got back in touch with a school in town that has some open land, who we'd talked with last year when we first started looking for a field to use. They were still excited to have us, so we mowed and had it plowed over the weekend. Jeremy has been out there all day today making beds, and I think we're going to plant tomorrow! Things sure move fast sometimes!

So that's the news from the farm. If you've been thinking about signing up for a CSA share, now's the time! If you're already a member, we can't wait to give you your first veggies!

After a beautifully sunny week, it's snowed about an inch over the past two days. It's supposed to be in the high seventies over the weekend.

And that's spring in Vermont.

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!

We just got confirmation that we were approved for a grant that we applied for a few weeks ago. It's a micro-business development grant from CVOEO (the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity), which we'll use to get a bed shaper and some other important equipment for our walk-behind tractor, as well as part of our set-up for the Farmer's Market.

The grant money came from ARRA (a.k.a. The Stimulus), and it's really going to be a big help. We're really pleased and grateful to be receiving this grant - plus, we got to use the business plan we spent so much time on this winter! The satisfaction of doing that might be almost as great as the money.

In other news, the carrots are more than an inch tall, spinach looks like spinach, radishes are sprouting, and the peas are taking off!

Well growing time is here again!  It feels great to get out from behind the desk of winter paperwork and get our hands in the dirt again.  This week we seeded some field crops (onions, leeks, and celery) and our greenhouse nightshade family plants (tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers).  These were seeded into soil blocks and will be transplanted into their respective homes in about 10-12 weeks.  We also got to spend some time in the soil transplanting the spinach we started back in February.  There are some pictures of all this 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.