This Week on the Farm 4/6
We were on the go this week, running errands and attending marketing events. It is nice to be home and be able to hang out in the greenhouses. This past Monday we seeded close to 3,500 pepper seeds. We planted eleven varieties of peppers this season. I went a little crazy with the pepper order this year. We wanted to reduce the number of hot peppers in the boxes without losing variety this season, so we are trying two or three new medium heat peppers. We also wanted to increase the variety of color in the boxes, so we ordered a purple bell to mix in with our green and red bells. I am really excited about the Iko Iko pepper which is a bell that is multicolored. I fell for the photos in the seed catalog and had to order it. Needless to say, we will have a lot of peppers this season!
On Monday afternoon Tyler trimmed the bulb onions. This year he tried using a shop vac to suck up the cuttings as he trimmed the onions with a scissors. It worked really well and helped to keep the greenhouse clean. In the past we have trimmed our onions seedlings one to two times before they are transplanted outside. Trimming them actually helps to increase bulb size.
Since Monday we have been running all over meeting with lots of our current members and with many potential members. It is always nice to meet new people and to talk about CSAs. It also gave us a chance to see how the snow is melting in a lot of different areas. Thankfully most of the snow has finally melted. With the rain that is forecasted, we hope that most of the frost will be out of the ground in the next week. The countdown to transplanting and seeding outside has begun. We are just waiting for the ground to warm up.
This weekend we are going to work on dismantling an old building that collapsed near our west barn. The building finally came down with the heavy snow load this winter. My sister once asked me why farmers leave buildings up that look like they are about to collapse. My answer was that it is less dangerous to just let it collapse and then deal with the rubble. Now that the weather is warming up and we will be able to tackle the rest of the new packing shed project, we need to clean up the old building to make the work area safer.
Next week will be another busy week. We have to drive down to Blue Mounds to pick up our seed potatoes. We also have to finish the final clean up of the barn before some family comes to help us with the heavy demolition work in the basement of the barn. Also, since our big greenhouse and our germination house are full, we need to do a couple of repairs on our hoop houses so we are ready to start seeding all of seeds scheduled to go in next week. Spring has definitely started!