Learning weekend...

This was a good weekend.

On Friday, my husband went to a hoophouse workshop. We are getting ready to purchase a 16x28 heated hoophouse for our starts (so, unlike last year, we don't have to bring them in and out of the barn twice a day!) so we wanted to make sure we were on the right track.

But the coolest piece of information we got was not about hoophouses but about about grafting. All your fruit trees are grafted, and most grape vines, and I guess in Japan lots of vegetables are to! What we can do is take an heirloom start and graft it onto a non-heirloom rootstock. This way we can get lots of the dieses reistance of the non-heirloom plant and still get the fruits of a heirloom. And since there is no genetic transfer or anything like that you can still save seed from the fruits. This is VERY cool stuff. I don't know if we will be able to try it this year, but we are definatly intrested in cool technologies like this.

On Saturday we sat in a panel for a lunch time discussion with farmers who are considering starting a CSA at a workshop sponsored by the Countryside Conservancy. And if any of them are reading this now, Thanks to everyone who said they read the blog, and liked it! That is SO nice to hear! And I will reiterate what we said yesterday as our primary advice... Start small and grow slowly.

Today is house cleaning and some more field planning!