Since I last wrote, we've officially taken the turn from winter into spring, hooray! Today's rain showers remind me of the "may" flowers that will soon be blooming.
We were really excited to begin construction of our future trellis to support our hardy kiwi vines that we will soon be planting (wow, lots of future conditional stuff seems to be happening in that sentence!)
This year we are trying several new things in the greenhouse and two of them are evident in this photo.
First, we are trying out soil blocks for growing transplants. The soil blocks provide more volume of soil compared to the plastic trays with individual holes that we used to use. We would also like to reduce our use of specified plastic planting trays, currently we own about 5 different sizes because different plants need to be grown in different size cells. With soil blocks, we can just have one size tray- open, with no cells built into it, and we can adjust the size of the soil blocks that fit into it.
The plastic planting trays do last quite a while- in fact many are starting their seventh year of farming, just like we are- but eventually they will end up in the landfill. As, unfortunately the system for recycling agricultural plastics is still, shall we say, "under development". Not a huge deal with a small farm like ours, but adds up to a lot of waste at a large farm using a high degree of plasticuluture technology!
The second thing that is new in the greenhouse and evident in the photo, is that we will try grafting some of our tomatoes this year. Grafting is more commonly understood as a way to propogate fruit trees or ornamentals, but apparently many farmers are beginning to graft tomato varieties that are susceptible to disease onto root stocks that have been breed to not be tasty necessarily, but that have strong disease resistance as well as a hardy growth habit. We have sown two seeds in each soil block- one of the vigorous disease resistant variety and one of a scrumptious variety that we have lost productivity of to disease.
Once they have reached sufficient size, we will graft them together, discarding the top of the rootstock variety and leaving the delicous variety to be supported by the roots of the disease resisitant variety. In theory that is all there is to it, we'll see how we make out in our first attempt. of course, we'll keep you posted!
Also this week, due to the high number of checks that we have recieved written to muddy fingers farm, we have finally taken the steps to get an account in the farm's name, so that is an important growth moment in our little farm's history.
don't forget the first CSA event of the season on April 18th!
Enjoy the spring flowers!
liz and matthew
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