Showing posts with label planning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label planning. Show all posts

Sunday, January 27, 2008

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!

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Brrrr from the farm!

Sorry I have not been posting as much recently. There is just not that much to talk about on the farm! (and 'real' job has been crazy as well, with training a new "green building" person, a project deadline looming and a 60 hour week.)

Thursday night hubby was out of town so I had to come home on time (not work late) to take the dog out and care for the chickens, so I had some quiet time to work on our planting schedule.

We are going through each type of produce and figuring a schedule, when to start, transplant, ect. and when to succession plant (radishes every 2 weeks during their growing season, beets every 3). Then we are going through our variety list and breaking that up into more specifics. We are also coordinating that with our field plans (where to plant what).

This will be the most organized year we have had. We know that weather will not always cooperate (it is often hard to plant seeds every week in the spring because it is often wet) but at least we will have a plan and a goal!

With any luck this will be our best year ever!


(OK, so the photo is not new, but it COLD out there!)