We will be having a CSA potluck lunch and workday startin at 12:00 this Saturday. If you plan to come please RSVP. Otherwise we will see you the first week of June when the CSA begins!

 Lilacs

Well I guess we've had spring and summer and now its back to winter!! I had to go shake the snow off the lilacs this morning to keep any more branches from breaking.
All of the young vegetables plants we have in the ground now should be okay though. They are all hardy and the snow will actually offer them some protection from the cold wind. And the tomatoes and cucumbers we transplanted in the hoophouse should be alive still (though not necessarily happy).

We love our paper-pot transplanter (so far)

We got to try out our new paper-pot transplanter last weekend. It worked better than we even hoped it would. We planted beds of beets, spinach and lettuce very quickly!! You can see it in action at the following link, courtesy of Molly Shaw at Cooperative Extension.
http://youtu.be/yKbdgux6uIo

The chickens moved outside to their permanent coop today. It was little on the chilly side, but they did not seem to mind. They seemed happy to have the space to roam. Pictures will follow.

I did our first weeding of the season - mostly quackgrass in a beet bed.

Our first CSA event of the season will be this Sunday. We will start with a potluck lunch here at 12:00, then head to the field to transplant probably chard, broccolis, cabbages and/or onions and also put more potatoes in the ground. Maybe it won't rain, but we actually could use the rain!! Go figure! Please call or email if you plan to come.

Also we moved our two goats out of the barn today. They now have plenty of tender young invasive honeysuckle leaves to eat rather just that boring old hay they've been eating all winter.

Frozen Blooms

Plum blossoms "first bloom" stage


Peach blossoms "first bloom" stage


Apple buds "tight cluster" stage


Tart cherry buds "first white" stage

Will we lose all the fruit in our orchard and the region tonight?
Well, we knew we might be in trouble when we had day upon day of 70-80 degree temperatures in mid-March. Now we have fruit trees in various stages of bloom and a frigid cold front that swept through the region last night.

Compare the above photos taken today in our orchard with the chart at:
http://extension.usu.edu/files/publications/factsheet/pub__5191779.pdf
The low tonight in our area is expected to be 20 degrees.

Our young, little orchard is still just starting to bear fruit and we are not really expecting much out of it yet this year. Maybe a bucket of cherries, a bushel or two of apples, and a few plums and peaches. But many of the orchards that we rely on for summer and fall fruit may be in danger. Apples seem like they'll probably be okay. But they all just depend on how far into blossom they are and this depends mostly on their individual microclimates around the trees. I am certainly no fruit expert so it will be interesting to see how much loss there is.


Ginger (the brownish pieces on the left) and galangal (the larger yellowish pieces with rings on the right)
Galangal is thai ginger. Some customers have seen our young ginger on our market stand and asked, "Is that galangal?" We responded, "What's galangal?"
Its also known as Thai ginger. And we've never tried it before, but we figured we should. So we purchased five pounds of seed pieces to give it a try. And the 5 lbs. of galangal and 50 lbs. of ginger arrived in the mail last week and planted them in potting soil in bulb crates immediately. They will be in the bulb crates until early May. Then once the seed pieces have green buds on them we will transplant them into the ground.

Chicken upd8

The dogs are VERY excited. They are learning that the chickens are now part of the farm and not snacks.

Black Australorps. The yellow chicks are all roosters, sent along with the others in the mail for warmth in transit. Which of the blacks are the two roosters? We'll just have to wait and see.


We are very proud of our homemade coop. We think the chickens will like it in a few weeks too!



Believe it or not, it is still winter. This weather is nuts. We've already planted seeds outside. Usually we don't get to plant outside until the middle of April!! We are kind of scared by this weather and feel like we got gypped out of winter.
But I'll not dwell on the weather. We've got chickens!

Muddy Fingers Chickens

After much thought and planning, we have decided to try our hands at having chickens here on our farm this year!
Having eggs available for the CSA and for sale was only a part of our reasoning for adding chickens to our farm. The real reason we got them was for their manure! We currently grow cash crops on all of our land every year. This does not leave us much space to add to our soil's fertility by growing large amounts of nitrogen-fixing and organic matter-adding cover crops like clovers, vetch, soybeans, rye, oats, etc.
Many farms add fertility to their soils by rotating cash crops with pastured livestock. So, though, we will still have to buy in the fertility (i.e. chicken feed), the chickens will take that feed and convert it into a form that is more available to our plants!
We have ordered 32 chicks - 30 pullets (females) and 2 cockerels (males). If you're interested, they are Black Australorps and will arrive next week!
Eggs will not be available until almost the end of summer. And we will not have a lot (maybe 10-12 dozen/week assuming they all survive). So we plan right now on only bringing them to one market (probably the Corning Market).
Above is a photo of their almost finished coop. It is still missing its covering and wheels. The chickens will be kept inside an electronet fence and will be rotated through fallow vegetable sections, the struggling asparagus patch and the orchard through the spring, summer and fall and will be in the greenhouse in the winter. Well, that's the plan anyway!
Updates to follow!

Gettin' busy

Moving our hoophouse
The hotbed
Filling trays for onions and leeks
The first indoor planting of lettuce mix, greens mix and spinach.

Here are the obligatory images of our first plantings of the year.
We are always excited to get started and at the same time reluctant knowing that our quiet, reflective season will soon be ending.