Rain, rain go away.....

We have hit about 14 inches of rain this April, which is an amazing 10 inches above average.  On the news they have said that this is the second wettest month on record, EVER, in this area since record keeping began back in the early 1900's.  But, the start of the growing season won't wait on drier weather, or on us, so, rain or shine, the farming has continued.

Having a greenhouse during this rainy season has been an indispensable asset that has been used to its near full potential.  We have been transplanting plants like crazy in there, from seedling flats that were started in February and early March.  From the funds we received at the bake sale we were able to acquire more ingredients for Mel's Mix soil, along with plastic solo cups (the cheapest but admittedly unsustainable way to transplant) , and are now finished with the first phase of the transplanting process.  The greenhouse is packed to the brim with healthy tomatoes, peppers, sunflowers, herbs, squash, cucumbers, etc., etc.  Inside our greenhouse has become its own micro ecosystem thanks to the mulch that we have been carting in from a shredded wood chip pile around the hill. The bottom layer of the greenhouse is lined with plastic, and on top of that, a layer mulch.  With as wet as it has been this month the mulch around the workstations where it has been walked on and wet, has turned to brown/black gold.  Just by walking and water, we have produced piles and piles of free soil.  Once we realized how sloppy it was getting in there, we raked all the new soil out of the greenhouse and used it in new boxes and rescued tires for even more growing space.  You wold not believe how many worms were hanging out in our mulch when we raked!  So, what next?  Cart in more of this free soil making mulch of course!  The greenhouse now has an even higher elevated mulch floor and we are planning to surround entire perimeter with the same.

We got the rest of the scrap wood de-nailed and ready for more box making.  The potatoes are now all in the ground and are in four 4x4 boxes in the front row of the garden, and in about 10 tires behind the greenhouse.  The potatoes are all planted 1 per square in the boxes ( = 48 seeds) and 4 per tire ( ~ 40 seeds), so there should be a descent amount of potatoes for harvest.  I have read that you  can plant potatoes as late as June 15 and then harvest them as late as possible.  Theoretically, this gives us a month and a half to keep planting potatoes, fund permitting.  A good item to have by harvest time would be a vegetable weigh machine, to keep track of the actual pounds of food produced, particularly potatoes, and make adjustments for subsequent years. 

Next up will be - planting the corn field, building more boxes for summer crops and transplants, transplanting, having our seedling giveaway on May 8th, and using up the rain that has filled up every barrel at the farm.

Bake Sale!

The bake sale today ended up being a huge success!  Even though we have have had almost three straight days of rain, mother nature cleared it all out and gave us a perfect five hour window here on Easter to plow on ahead with what we needed to do, and we thank her for it. We would also like to thank everyone that stopped by and made a donation to the garden project and in return got some tasty treats to enjoy and share with others.  It is truly feeling like a community effort at this point, with folks stopping by, swapping stories and enjoying each other's company - all the while furthering a good cause.  We came out way on top at $102.75 - which was above what we expected and a welcome surprise.  This money will be dumped right back into the farm, or "corn-holed", as Ty would so eloquently put it.  We even ended up having a small helper join our crew today - Travis, who has stated that he will take control of the worm committee. Thanks Travis! 

Next up on the agenda will be our seedling give away on May 8th - same concept as the bake sale - take what you want and give what you feel.  Thanks again to the whole community!

4/23/11

The weather service is saying that this is one of the rainiest April's on record, and I believe it!  There has been a flood watch for all rivers for almost a week straight now, and an end does not seem to be anywhere in sight.  It is raining cats and dogs right now, which is why I have taken to the internet to catch up on some blogging.

This rain has, however, done wonders for our garden.  The potatoes have just about all sprouted (minus the second week succession crop), and look as if they could handle any amount of rain that falls from the sky.  I think I will thank the Mel's mix for that, along with all of the other well-drained soil we have created and put to use in the garden.  I am very proud of their progress and all we need to do now is cut up the remaining seed potatoes, and find homes for them within the next week.

We have a carrot box that is coming in full force, probably 60+ altogether, which is an improvement over last year when we maybe had ten carrots total survive.  Those things are so tiny at first - the seeds and the seedlings; which makes for an intricate planting and thinning process. 

Tomorrow we are holding our first fund raising event - a bake sale!  There will be muffins, cookies, brownies, Oreo balls and whatever else we end up getting donated.  It is on Easter, and we should get some good traffic coming in and out of the property.  The forecast calls for rain, but we will be out there none the less, raising funds to keep this project moving forward!  Ciao!

Today was the only day of really good weather this week so I made the best of it. I went up to the garden and hardened off some plants by letting them sit out side in the sun for a few hours. They sure did love the sun light and it showed! Then I bush hogged the fields (cut grass on a tractor) till the sun started to set. "It felt good not to have my cell with in reach for a while, just me, my thoughts, and the crackle of that diesel engine." For tomorrow I'm not quite sure what will happen but I'm expecting great things. Stay awesome America!

Here comes another wonderful week, I can't wait to see what comes together for our group. We had a few hours yesterday and got a lot of things done. Brian surprised me with his ladder building skills, O'l Nate or brother Hezaciya as we call him has been keeping everyone motivated and in high spirits. We are quickly approaching the point where things will be exploding and growing like mad, but until then lets keep our nose to the grind stone and see what happens.

Yesterday couldn't have been better! We got a bunch of stuff done and ahead of the curb, well at least for today. Our second set of rain barrels are ready to be installed, the field was plowed, the compost was flipped, the grass was cut, and of course we planted more seeds. I know rain is in the forecast but with all the activity recently I figure a day off is well deserved, although I know I'll be in the green house at some point today to check on our little friends. -Ty-

The revolution IS growing!

Welcome to Our Garden Page!

This sign could not have come at a better time. Thanks, Debbie! It really is the first piece of what I hope will be many works of art featured in our community space. We are very fortunate to have the people around us that we do. From the people who work on the garden (soon to be IN the garden?) to the people who donate their old materials and equipment to help us along to the people donating their collected metal scraps and aluminum cans to our fund-raising efforts, we all should be very thankful! More to come very soon!

I awoke this morning with much anticipation to see what had been delivered by this good rain we had yesterday. I walked on up to the garden and as always greeted with a surprise. The plants of all varieties have bulked up and were looking bigger. The slight wind we had last night must have done wonders for them. The temperature in the green house never slipped below 45 degrees and the humidity was at a constant. Sun is in the forecast for tomorrow and plenty of work is to be done. Thanks for every ones help and stay awesome,-Ty-

4/10/2011

It was another busy and productive weekend on the farm with some great weather to boot!  It seems that the more we do out there, the more plans and ideas we come up with to put into action in the future.  I think it will be never ending and I am cool with that.  Every time we are out there working, the ideas just keep spewing out, coming naturally to all of us in an ebin flow sort of way.  We had a few visitors over the weekend and a donation as well!  With a $5 donation from and old timer who had retired from farming, we found a $4 pitchfork at the local flea market, score!  He also mentioned that he was "proud of what you boys are doing", which was a great compliment coming from a 'real' farmer. 

There are now three 4x4 potato boxes with 12 seeds in each, as well as six or seven salvaged tires each with 4 seed in each.  Two of the 4x4 boxes are filled with a blue variety of potato and I can't wait to have some blue french fries!  There are even more potatoes yet to be cut laying on our back burner for succession waves. 

Our female volunteer who came yesterday was of great help, planting away and getting her hands just as dirty as all of ours in the process.  I hope to see her again down there soon!  Ty has been working his tail off as usual, building a new shelving unit inside the greenhouse which cleared some much needed space and added more organization to the whole process.  We have enough pallets laying around that I can only imagine that he may have already made a second shelving unit as I am writing this post.  We purchased more vermiculite, peat, and compost over the weekend to keep shoveling in that mel's mix into our raised beds.  Along with the potatoes, we planted marigolds, basil, jolly jesters, more lettuce, snap peas, market carrots (short bulb type), all by seed;  Transplanting took place inside a very hot greenhouse, from seedlings that were planted back in February - a somewhat tedious process but at the same time, sort of meditative and relaxing.  Your back will end up hurting a bit from the whole deal, but you are handling life, and continuing its life process to the next stage.  You are only one part of it, a big part, but most of it is really up to the plants themselves.  We don't grow the plants, we just assist them.

I could not tell where that weekend started and where it ended, but I know for certain it was completely productive in every way.  Pics coming soon!

4/2/2011

Yesterday was another busy day in the garden.  The greenhouse is almost complete, the final step being put off until today because of rain. All that is lacking is the second sheet of plastic that needs to be secured over top of the first piece.  This task will not be too difficult, the only real work will be cutting and taping the plastic together in order to get enough length for the whole greenhouse.  Once the plastic is in place the greenhouse will be 'officially operational'  I say this because we did the first planting inside of it yesterday.

The first ever plant that ended up inside the greenhouse was a healthy looking cabbage plant, and we all wish him well.  Along with the cabbage we also planted some oregano clones in pots (6), some onions we started from seed (12), a few chard, and seven total cabbage plants all under the protection of plastic.

Now, in my area of the world, I have heard that it is okay to plant potatoes on St. Patrick's day, March 17.  Since I did not find this out until a few days ago, I cut up and prepared 6 lbs of potatoes that were ready to be planted yesterday.  This first wave of potato planting included yukon gold and red norland varieties, 3 lbs of each.  I was surprised to find how many eye seeds this actually came out to be and we had to use quite a bit of soil and space to get them all planted.  Fortunately for us, we had a $30 donation, free wood, and free tires at our disposal, and out of this we made a small potato farm.  Four tires were positioned behind the greenhouse, where it will still get plenty of sun, and underneath the tires we laid a layer of garden cloth to prevent attacks from below.  Next we put a layer of organic compost, then 4 potato seeds positioned as such to maximize space, then filled it to the tire rim with organic topsoil.  I like to use Mel's Mix or ProMix when I grow potatoes, but the $30 only went so far in soil attainment, thus requiring more amendments in the future.  Once the tires were full with soil, we added a layer of mulch.  Once the potatoes sprout out of this layer, a new tire will be added on top and more soil as necessary. 

I want to be clear on one thing before I get into more details, this garden should be able to sustain itself strictly through donations and by the revenue it can potentially incur.  The goal should be self-sustainability, and, if we are good gardeners and liaisons to the community, I believe this is 100% possible.  It has already proven effective in that we have purchased no wood, have had monetary donations, and we can scrap tires and aluminum for use in our operation.  Mulch and compost should be free forever, since there is a shredded wood pile back a bit further on the property.

Now, back to the potatoes; The rest of the potato seeds were planted in a 4x4 square foot garden bed in front of the greenhouse.  I believe the bed is 4-6 inches deep but another gardener we have on the project has already built two more 4x4 frames that can be stacked on top of this one as the potatoes outgrow the first box.  Even after four tires and a 4x4 frame, there were still about 16 potato seeds left.  So, as night fell, we took these seeds back to our own house on the lake for planting.  We have a few large bio growing bags that we had used for potatoes last year and we decided to use them for these potatoes this year.  We washed the bags in the lake as best we could, and started with Mel's Mix in the bottoms of the bags.  We planted four seeds in each of these bags and set them out on the dock.

In a nutshell, that was the day's events, and now it is back out there for more.  The sun is shining and it looks to be a beautiful day.