Happy February Farm Friends! As you can see things at Big Lick are going ahead full steam. First off we wanted to introduce the newest member of the farm. That is "Tautia" (sounds like Tulsa) which means soldier in Asinete's language. He is a 9 week old yellow lab puppy. Asinete named him Tautia as when he grows larger the puppy will be the soldier patrolling the farm from any deer. At the farm he seems most interested in wanting to chase the chickens (a big no no) or else finding a nice pile of goose droppings to munch on (yuck!) and people always say how sweet puppy breath is! Our older golden retriever Kestrel is the perfect babysitter.
In the other pictures you can see the heating table that Asinete designed and did a great job on. This table is layered with sand, chicken wire and heating cables. The cables are tied down on the chicken wire to keep it in place. Then we put another layer of sand on top of the cables and on that put our seed trays that need that extra bottom heat (peppers, eggplant and tomatoes). In the background you can see as I started the first few seed trays to go on the inside of the heating table. Today I started Mucho Nacho peppers, sweet cluster tomatoes, green zebra tomatoes, black beauty eggplant, sungold cherry tomatoes, ancho peppers, and black krim tomatoes. This is just the beginning as tomorrow we can start going full force with seed sowing. Seed sowing is one of my favorite parts of farming. Every step from mixing together the seedling mix (coco peat, vermiculite, cottonseed meal, kelp meal, fish bone meal, lime, and blood meal). All of these mixed together make for a nutritionally complete environment for a seed to flourish in!
We spent Saturday planting 44 fruit trees on our back pasture. We planted 4 varieties of peaches for a total of 42 trees. We stuck with 3 old time favorites which are Suncrest, Rio Oso Gem, and Red Haven as well as the Frost peach trees which are said to be resistant to peach leaf curl. Sadly I was not able to get pictures of us planting the trees as both of our hands were covered in mud! In the next two days we will plant the remaining 23 trees. These include some great apple varieties as well as some persimmon trees (hachiya and fuyu). Nothing more beautiful to me than a persimmon tree in the fall... the naked trees strewn with bright orange fruits.
Our next project is to get the wood stove connected into our greenhouse for heating the entire structure. That's the thing with farming.. there's always something new to learn!
The hour is late now for this farmer as the dawdling days of winter seem to be over.
Be well!
Suzie, Asinete, Tautia and Kestrel
1 comment:
Wood stove in the greenhouse eh? That sounds very cozy. May all your seeds grow to be big and strong and produce much needed nutrition for your community.
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