March 28-29 - new tiller, planting peas, finishing seed trays
DON’T FORGET TO MARK YOUR CALENDARS - THIS YEAR’S PLANTING DATES WILL BE MAY 16-17, AND MAY 23-24. ALL CHERRY RIDGE FARM CSA MEMBERS - WE’LL NEED YOU :)
Also note: we’ll be forwarding around a plan shortly, detailing the various plantings along with a signup sheet for individual jobs.
Introducing…our newest garden friend. The Honda FG110. When I first looked at this thing, I laughed. After all, we use a 23-horsepower Kubota garden tractor pulling a four-foot wide tiller, which will pretty much till through whatever you choose to run it through. This year, however, we’re trying a different approach - we’re just going to till in the actual row where we’re planting, instead of running the Kubota over the entire garden in the Spring, leaving newspaper and straw in the paths. This should seriously cut down on weeding mid-summer.
This thing works great. We used it this weekend to get our first spring planting done in the garden - snap peas. Peas need to go into the garden pretty much as soon as the soil can be worked. Other seeds that we’ll be putting in as soon as possible are Calendula (for Sally’s first aid spray), Spring Raab, Arugula, Purple Mizuna, and Spicy Mesclun.
As you can see, our garlic is already up and going strong - having lain dormant through the winter - even before we’ve really had a chance to clean up the watering hoses and path-plastic that blew around since last Fall.
On Saturday, after we got the peas in, we put together the garden plan for this year. That’s below…the full list of items we’re growing is in the post below.
Today, Scott Cairns came up to help us out with mixing up soil and getting together our pre-season planting in our basement…no small task, and one that Sally and I normally do ourselves. We were glad for the help!
The first trick is to figure out how many plants you need to do. If you’ve got unlimited greenhouse space, you can just plant full trays of plants and figure out where to put them later. But if your greenhouse is your basement, you need to plan.
Once we’d figured out how many plants we needed, we headed down to the basement for the fun stuff - mixing the soil and getting the seeds together. We use a compost from McEnroe Organic Farm, just south of the Vermont border with New York. We mix their potting soil (compost with greensand and a few other goodies mixed in) with sand, vermiculite, and a lot of water (more than you think you need).
Once that’s done, we make soil blocks using a soil-stamping tool, then organize and put the seeds in. Caroline helped us out. We wound up with eleven boxes of seeds - most of the flowers, basil, tomatoes, parsley, beets, fennel, peppers, kale, and chard. The rest of our seeds either get put directly into the garden during our planting weekends, or they’ll go in next weekend along with the rest of the early seeds.
Thanks again Scott and Caroline for the help!
