>Spring Is Here

Spring has been here, and it seems to be back to winter for a few days, but I thought I’d post some photos and share our winter activities with everyone.

The beautiful weather in February made it possible to get some ground plowed-up and planted. We ordered our onion transplants early and Luis has almost finished planting them. We got 5 cases of “Walla Walla” onions which we can start harvesting as early as June for little sweet salad onions. Hopefully that will be enough to last until September. We also got 1 case each of Red Torpedo and Cipollini, and for winter storage we got 2 cases of yellow and 1 case of red. There are about 1800 plants in a case, so that’s a heck of a lot of onions. Hopefully it will be enough for everyone. The overwintered spring onions and green onions are not included in the case order, because we plant those from seed, so I don’t know how many thousands of onions we end up planting for the CSA subscribers. It’s a lot of thousands.

The garlic is up, and you can see it here with last fall’s leeks in the background. We’ll be picking those soon for the Spring Shares. Unfortunately, we won’t have quite as much garlic as last year (last year we had a humungous crop) because we didn’t want to risk the huge investment in case we flooded and lost it all.

Most of our seeds have arrived and I’ve got them all inventoried. Does this look like $3,000? It doesn’t to me, but that was our total. We’re still waiting for the Italian beans and potatoes.

The new chicks arrived last week, and are growing well. There are 75 and they’re supposed to be girls. They should all start laying eggs in late summer, as the current hens are getting ready for their vacation.

The decision to build a new hen house finally was pushed to the top of the list when we tried to move the old one and it fell apart. Time for a viking funeral for that one. We pondered how to build a replacement cheaply for a few days, when we remembered that we had an old metal and wood farm trailer in the back. We haven’t used it, like, ever and the wooden decking was all rotting out, but the steel frame was still fine and so were the wheels and axles. Voila! We built the house on top of it and now we’ll be able to move them anywhere we want to . Wheels are an amazing invention. It will be a huge improvement over dragging.

The biggest plus is that we can stand up inside this house. There is plenty of roost space for sleeping, a wire mesh floor so the manure goes straight to the ground, and a lot of nest space that is accessible by the children. More work for the kids—that’s the motto for this year.

The cows have been busy as well. Juniper had her baby, a black girl we named Penelope, on March 5th. Then, Beauty had her baby, a dun (brown) girl we named Matilda, on March 8th. Both girls are doing well, and so are their mamas.