Sunday, April 20, 2008

Weekend tasks..

Saturday was beautiful... We were working by 8 and managed to get quite a bit done. I was playing with our transplants in the basement, and starting more seeds. When I did that hubby was discing and tilling. When he was ready we hilled the rows we needed. We were waiting for rain and needed to move fast! Our hiller is a little lite to work well, so I get to stand on the back of it as we lay hills to help make better hills!

We got about 1000 feet of hills done and then started planting! The forecast was saying it could rain at any time and the sky looked like it! So first we used our new Jang Seeder to put in some turnips, beets, radishes, green onions, and other pretty frost tolerant crops, aiming for the May 31rst farmers market. Oh, and our new seeder works like a dream! We only got 1/2 ounce of one of the turnip seeds as it was so expensive, I expected to be able to do 25 - 30 feet of row with it. But we set up the seeder for turnips and changed the gearing to put them down at about 2" apart, and I got 150 feet in and still have about half my seed left! The seeder was worth the $500+ it cost!

After we got all the seeds in that we really needed to we sighed in relief, because the rest could be done in light rain... So we started transplanting our onion starts. We got all 1800 onions in the ground! Then came the slightly harder work of putting the leeks in (the onions just go in an inch, the leeks go in so only an inch of the leafs are above ground so 3-4 inches deep). We got about 1000 leeks in before the sky opened up around 5:30. But that was OK as we were going to a friends surprise 50th birthday party and needed to shower and get there by 7:45. So it was a pretty long day, but we got a huge amount done.

On Sunday it was rainy most of the day, so we stayed inside did some bookkeeping stuff, ran some errands, did research on asparagus (which we need to order soon!) and played with our transplants and starts (go another 700 plants started and transplanted that many on to bigger containers.)

There is still so much to do, but we are making progress. This week we will hope for it to be sunny for most of it (looking good) and work on our hoop house while hoping we can put in more hills on Friday or Saturday... We have 800 feet of potatoes coming this week we hope...

And the best news of all, even though we were bent over planting onions for hundreds and hundreds of feet we did not wake up sore as we were expecting!

This weeks big purchases include the post hole digger, a potato plow, and the bees (if they come.) It feels good to not be behind in late April...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You paint such a detailed and lovely picture of what I imagine is some very hard work Heather. Thanks for sharing.

Tina