Gildrien Farm
  • Home

June!

6/26/2010

0 Comments

 
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!
0 Comments

Big News!

4/17/2010

2 Comments

 
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!
addyindy4_15_10.pdf
File Size: 4731 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

2 Comments


    Follow us on Facebook for more updates!

    Picture

    Archives

    March 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    March 2013
    November 2012
    October 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    January 2011
    September 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    September 2009

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Carrots
    Chickens
    Community
    Csa
    Fall
    Flood
    Garlic
    Ginger
    Greenhouse
    Land
    Market
    NOFA VT
    NOFA-VT
    Photos
    Pond
    Snow
    Solar
    Spinach
    Spring
    Squash
    Summer
    Tomatoes
    Vegetables
    Water
    Winter

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.