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
