This Week on the Farm 3/22
Well it finally felt like spring until we woke up this morning with snow on the ground. Now I know we didn’t get nearly as much snow as people farther north of us, but it is still a little depressing. Thankfully our greenhouses worked perfectly and all of our plants were kept warm and snuggly last night.
The Brussels sprouts are already up! I think that is the fastest germination time this spring. We watered them in on Thursday and by Monday most of the seeds had germinated.
Tyler spent a good portion of Monday working on the potato planter. It was built circa 1900 and hasn’t been used in years, so there is a lot of work to do in order to get it up and running. The great thing about equipment that old is that you can look at it and be able to figure out what is wrong since it is all mechanized and not run by a computer. All you need is a lot of elbow grease (and normal grease) and time to figure it out and you should be able to fix it. Or at least that is what we are hoping!
This week two types of tomatoes are getting started, as well as cabbage and kohlrabi. We ran into some germination problems with the celery we planted a couple weeks ago, so we ordered more and will get those into the greenhouse later today. It turns out celery needs light to germinate, something the seed company failed to put on the packaging. Live and learn.
Last Friday Tyler went to Lake Mills to pick up a pallet of Chickity Doo Doo. It is literally a ton of chicken poo. We have it stored in the old grain bin to keep it dry. I am somewhat concerned about the number of old honeycombs we found on the ground in there. It will make it interesting taking them out of the grain bin this summer I guess. And at least we know that none of us are allergic to bees, although they hurt pretty badly.
As soon as this snow melts we need to build our hoophouse extension. We are running out of room quickly now that we are expanding. We have all of the supplies, now we just need a snow free base to build on.
More flowers are starting to grow in the gardens. With all of this rain they should grow quickly if we get some more warm weather.
Last year’s fall planting of our cover crop worked really well. When the snow melted earlier in the week it revealed a nice field of green rye.
