6% of 1%, you figure it out...

These are my last few hours ever.

My last few hours ever in my twenty's anyway, I turn the big 30 tomorrow! now neither of us can be trusted, i guess.

Again longer than we have meant has lapsed since we posted. Things are coming along swimmingly, and hopefully lots of people will get a chance to see that this weekend when they come on up to our second "pre-season" CSA get together on saturday. we'll have a potluck lunch at noon and then do some "season appropriate" transplanting for an hour or two. We really appreciate those who come out to see the farm, meet people, help build our farm community, and of course, a hand with farm tasks for an hour is a huge help to us and hopefully not a huge burden to our members! We have some standing tasks for people who find it difficult to get close to the ground as well as for those who find that easy, but getting back up to be hard!



this is taken from the same spot as a photo in the last posting. Its all planted, and now the plants are much more visible above the hay mulch.

We are ahead of where we have been in the past in our transplanting and planting. Partly this is in part due to how incredibly dry April was at our land, we didn't have much more than half and inch of rain fall on our place, and most veggies want an inch or rain a week. The dryness helped us to get the field preparation work done, but it also meant we were doing quite a bit of irrigating, and our pond is dropping already. (we don't mind seeing it fall in June, but in april (which is when we noticed it) it is scary because, what is in there may be all the water we have for all season, in the event of a severe drought.)



the other reason that we are ahead is that we were lucky enough to have a friend stay with us for a week. He was a huge help, cheerfully working on whatever tasks we needed help on, even picking rocks up so that we won't find them with the lawnmower later. Rain or shine (we did have little shower while he was here) our friend steven was ready with a smile on his face. Thanks so much Steven, if you are reading this!


Last time i wrote about several presentations that we had given, we were excited to give one more recently- i appeared at a middle school career day. I was so glad to see that they had thought to invite an agriculture representative to a career day. It was really neat to see young people interested in a career in agriculture. While preparing the presentation, i learned or relearned several interesting agriculture facts.

Only one percent of americans are farmers. (though 2% live on farms).

Of that one percent of the american population who are farmers, the average age is 55, with only 6% of farmers under the age of 35.

there are currently more americans in prison, than there are american farmers!

we talked about how important it is for young people to be interested in becoming farmers because as the "average" farmer ages and heads toward retirement age, who will feed us? according to the EPA, each day the US loses 3000 acres of productive farmland, no doubt there is a risk of that increasing in ten years when the "average" farmer retires if there is no one ready to take over their farmland. it was great to get to be a youngish farmer talking to potential young farmers of the future. I'm so glad that i was asked!

its asparagus season! Hope you are indulging in fresh, local asparagus- and often! Tonight we enjoyed our sauteed with some overwintered leeks and chick peas drizzled with balsamic vinager and plenty of black pepper. We served it with pasta, and let me just say, YUM! this year, as we have previously said, we planted asparagus ourselves! It will be two years before we will be harvesting any, but its nice to have it started anyway!

this is what the crowns looked like when we planted them.


and this is the first peek we had of them coming up through the soil. Now they are just fronding out and are about knee high.



its supposed to be pretty chilly tonight, frost warnings abound. We have a few beds of tomatoes in the ground already, so here they are, all tucked in for the night, hope they stay warm enough in the next two nights!



thanks for checking in with us, the CSA will be starting before we know it, only two weeks to go! Liz (and matthew)

Busy season!

almost all of these plants are now in the ground!

This is the time of year...
when it is easy to find work to do right up to nightfall.
when dinner is often salad, pasta, popcorn, ice cream or something otherwise easy.
when the to do list is long and growing.
when the cherry trees burst into bloom all in one day (today).
when the call of the peepers entertains us as we eat dinner and go to bed.
Where we are planting a lot and each day the greenhouse is a little emptier. (still quite full, though)


Our friends Theresa and Brent have a farm very similar to ours over in jacksonville, she writes a column about the farm in each issue of "Edible Finger Lakes" (a magazine about local food and food producers) The current one has a great column about why they became farmers. I really appreciated her thoughts about why they do what they do. Sometimes people say, "wow, farming that is hard work." Which is true, there is hard work involved. But, she talks in her article about how one of the joys of running a small farm is the mental challenge and though i had never put it into words that way, it is true.

there is also so much more-- the chance to be one's own boss, the opportunity to plan and execute each day tailored to one's own desires (though sometimes the job of the day chooses us), the joy of listening to birds calls and stopping to watch a spider spin a web or the turtles in the pond slip under the water and glide away. There is the constant challenge of creative problem solving and the moment of wonder, when what seems like just the right answer materializes. and just as enjoyable is figuring out a second plan if the first did not work.

But i think she hit the nail on the head, for me the beauty of being a farmer is the mental work of figuring out plants per row feet, transplants per bed, a sensible crop rotation, how to squeeze in a covercrop, where to put a perennial crop, how many dollars to anticipate earning per bed. how to squeeze in another cropping of greens from this bed before we plant the tomatoes. It is making these choices that is like being a conductor weaving together several melodies to make a harmonious whole. Each strand of well timed music makes a better whole in the end. As farmers we get to practice each year moving each little piece closer to perfection so that our whole farm comes together into a more harmonious whole. The real joy of farming for me is the mental challenge of bringing together all the various pieces into a completion as a thing of beauty that can sustain us and i enjoy the gift of each new chance to try out new ideas and see how much finer we can tune to operation that we have going here.



It's been a while since i posted! (the kales pictured in the last posting are already in the field and growing) I've been meaning to put an update up, but boy have we been busy! In the last week in addition to farming, we had three different speaking engagements (an after school program, an appearance at an earthday event, and a talk at the rotary club (thanks to all three for inviting us! Nice to see the interest in local agriculture out there growing!)) We attended our first market of the regular season, and we have had lots of visitors and had our first CSA event of the year! We have planted 600 asparagus crowns, several new trees, and lots of beds of vegetables. We also had our tractor repaired (and thus were without it for several weeks) and had water and electricity run to our "greenbarn" so that we could move our wash area under cover there, and eventually, soon, i hope, put up our walk in cooler out there. This is the trench that the lines were run in.



Several weeks ago i meant to post as we had a minor tragedy. Mice got into our hot bed where we start seedlings, and ate a decent amount of our tomato and pepper seedlings. We have replanted and most are growing all right, but it was a set back, we kept saying, "we need the snakes to move in" because every year at some point, they colonize the greenhouse and the mouse problem is resolved. Well good news, they have arrived! So hopefully we are out of harm's way in terms of rodent damage.

HUGE thanks to all that attended our first CSA work day on april 18th! We had a great time and really enjoyed meeting every one and are really appreciative of the help! We had a nice potluck and then mulched for and planted broccoli, cabbage, and onions. It was A BIG HELP! Thanks again to Julie, Garret, Evelyn, Dorothy, Jane, John, Suzie, Juliet, Carolina, David, Mary, and later in the week, Sarah, Stephen, Ira, and Chris! With their help we were able to spread almost all of this enormous pile of hay bales onto the beds and then plant all the beds in the foreground!



My Dad snapped some photos of the work day for us, but i couldn't find the file readily, i'll try to do that and post them later.

Tommorrow's job has found us already as we currently have a tractor with only three functional wheels sitting in the driveway. Then hopefully the brussels sprouts can go out! Don't miss the next opportunity to come on out to the farm on May 23rd, an email will remind you several days before. Hope you can make it! Thanks for supporting local agriculture! Stay cool.
liz and matthew

Welcome to Spring!

things are growing along nicely in the recenty lovely weather, here are some precious little kale plants!



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

a lovely day

Today it is a lovely day! The sun is shining, the air is warm, the honey bees are out in force, and its hard not to be happy. We have a few daffodil bulbs that we "forced" to bloom inside and they are sitting on the porch today as we engage in some much needed spring cleaning inside, the bees, always keeping "busy", are all over them, fighting to get to the blossoms that are open. Its nice to know that the resident honey bees survived the winter (they belong to a friend who cares for them and we benefit from having them around, but not having to do any work!)

Things are growing in the greenhouse and our first tomatoe seeds are planted in preparation for transplant (perhaps some of them with your help on May 23rd) about 8 weeks from now.

This is my favorite time of year to look at onion and leek plants, each little plant reaching for the sky, sporting at the tip a tiny little seed coat, still clinging there and perhaps giving its last little bit to the growing plant. Eventually those seed coats drop and all evidence of their tiny origin is erased, but for now, the growth is so tangible, each time we look.



We have been reworking our irrigation system, replacing the 1 inch line with a 2 inch line out to our biggest vegetable blocks so that we can water more beds at one time. We moved some of the lines in the orchard around to in order to accomodate the new field that we will be growing cover crops in this year and vegetables in next year. We are plotting out where exactly to put our newest acquisitions this year. We have some more red raspberries and some new yellow and purple raspberries, asaparagus crowns, elderberries, hazelnuts, apricot, peach, and cherry trees and a few hardy kiwi vines to place. Its been fun to watch our plantings grow "organically" as we have money to invest in more plants as well as new ideas that make us want to take on a new project. Some no doubt will be failures, but many will be new sources of income and enjoyment for us (hooray for fresh peaches!)



The CSA memberships are always a pleasure to get in the mail, only darkened a little by the fact that several folks have missed the back of the form where instructions about who to write the checks to are written (Liz Martin, NOT muddy fingers farm, please). Its so neat to read the comments written on the forms, it takes me back to when we were planning our wedding and we would race to the mailbox each day to see who had sent an rsvp postcard back as so many of those had little messages inscribed in the empty spaces. It really makes our day to read that people are looking forward to the produce, or thanking us for letting them get involved on a farm, the other day one arrived that just said, "can't wait!" i could really relate! Farming can be such a solitary occupation, with spring being so full of things to do that it is easy to feel overwhelmed, its great to have a relationship with those who all the toil will benefit and to feel appreciated by them, especially since we appreciate them so much! It is hard to overstate how helpful it is to us to get an infusion of money in the spring just in time to pay our farm insurance, car insurance, school tax, and self employment taxes for the year! Thank you so much for investing in our farm!
happy almost spring!~
liz and matthew

New Truck!

Hey all we picked out a "new" used truck and bought it yesterday, it seems like a solid, classic piece of detroit engineering. Its a really clean (with no rust), 5 speed manual transmission 1994 Ford F150. It has a nice big bed that will hold lots of produce. It should work very well for us. we also think we have a red cap lined up to go on top. We will miss our 1985 Volvo station wagon, but think we have a good home lined up for it.
stay warm~!
liz and matthew

wramping up for the season!

first few trays of onions and leeks


the bee boxes against a perfect blue sky


mixing up potting mix


Thanks to all who have joined the CSA already! We are pleased each and every time we bring in the mail and recieve a membership form (and check)! As is our custom, we sent our membership forms to last years members about two weeks ago, and we are now readying our selves to send forms out to potential new members, we have our largest list ever with 50 people who were interested in learning more about the CSA!

We know that the winter is wearing thin and that springtime weather will be here before we know it. The signs are everywhere, in the last two weeks we have finished up our canned strawberries and peaches and so we are now really looking forward the season for local fruits to roll back around. There are some forsythia branches on our table that are about to burst into bloom, (we hope) as each day we see more of the yellow blossoms swelling out. The plants are started in the greenhouse and many more will be started in march and over then next few weeks. The garlic is well rooted and safe beneath a thick layer of hay mulch.

We've been busy looking for a new "used" truck and think that in the next week or so that we will buy one. We looked at a promising one today.

We are so pleased to have our three "working shares" from last season lined up to help us again! And are still looking for another few, so if you are interested, please be in touch.

things are going well as we get ready for a new season. Thanks for checking in!
liz and matthew

shhh...the farmer's are sleeping...

Thanks to all who have been checking back occasionally to see what is going on here at muddy fingers farm. According to this site - not much. But that is not the case! We have still been going to market once a week, with today scheduled to be the last market of 2008, unfortunately the roads around us were quite slick and the snow kept falling all day, so we missed the market and the annual rutabega curl, bummer! We did get to do some nice cross country skiing, so that is good, but we were sorry to be snowed in from a day out.
Pictured is an event from a few weeks back, when we rented a gi-normous chipper and made our own mulch for around the trees in our orchard and our blue berry plants. It is super fun to make our own mulch, first it kills two proverbial birds with one stone (cleaning out unsightly brush while clearing some new land and also keeping weeds from growing around our young trees- i guess that's three birds) and secondly, it is a huge rush to put a six inch diameter piece of wood into the machine, and have chips come out the other end! If you ever find a huge brush pile around your place, we highly recommend a chipper!

With all that chipping done, we had managed to clear a new area that will be put into production either in 09 or cover cropped next year and used to grow in 2010. Matthew moved the fence around our field out enough to accomodate the new growing area and its great to have some more room to use. We will not be expanding production, instead, we will use the new space to allow ourselves to have two areas of our current field "fallow" each year, thus allowing them to rest while we grow crops to feed the soil in them. The idea of a fallow is an important one for sustainable farming and its an old one, too. We have been worried that we didn't have enough land to really rest any of it (and instead we would have to buy compost to truck in that fertility), and are excited to have made room to grow soil improving crops every four years or so in each spot.

In addition to farm stuff, we have been enjoying sleeping, reading a lot, cross country skiing, taking walks in the snow (or not depending on the day), and are looking forward to ice skating when the ice is really hard.

We couldn't resist saying welcome to winter, since tomorrow is the darkest day of the year! Check back again sometime,
liz and matthew