How does your garden grow? Beautifully!

It is difficult sometimes this time of year to stop, take a breath and enjoy the beautiful things around us that we have toiled to nurture along. This evening I found myself with two options.. pull weeds (always an option) or tour the gardens and try to capture some of the amazing things going on at Big Lick Farm! Of course I chose to enjoy and document the goings on at the farm and check the progress of all the crops. Above you can see our healthy onion patch that the Phoenix students freed from the quack grass. There is also a picture of our bok choy that was looking so promising for the first CSA share but in the last few days bolted and went to flower. Some of it was tilled under to add nutrients to the soil and the others carried down to the pigs~ they truly are omnivores! While touring around I hunted for the first snow pea I could find and savored the delicate flavor of that first pea as though it was the finest truffle! Our broccoli is coming along and will hopefully fill the gap in the CSA share that the bok choy left.
Only 11 more days to CSA time! ahhhhhhh!!! No more leisurely strolls through the garden from here on out! We are thankful that we will get at least one more work day with the Phoenix School kids on June 1st so hopefully we will be caught up for that first week of CSA! Hooray!! beautifully

Phoenix Students at Big Lick Images

Phoenix School Comes to Big Lick !

Hooray!!! We have been blessed with some great help to our business this last week! A few days ago we received a call from a project coordinator of the garden program at Phoenix School. The school received stimulus funds for employing youth on different projects in our community. We were so excited when we found out they would be coming! Both Asinete and I are already feeling the affects of the rush warm weather puts on a farmer and so some youthful energy was just the ticket! The students helped us to plant tomatoes on our new acreage that the pigs cleared, we weeded 7 rows of onions, thinned beets and hilled potatoes, pulled out bolting chard and weeded the snow peas... whew we were all tired at the end of the day and the students got first hand experience about what it takes to be an organic farmer!
Time to get some rest as we have 10 more students coming out tomorrow for another day of fun at the farm!

Busy Big Lickers!

Good day! Whew.. let me catch my breath for a minute! As you can see from our blog post we have been very busy! We have met quite a few of you at the Umpqua Valley Farmer's Market where we have been for the past three weeks (see photos above). Asinete and I decided that instead of trying to plant 6,000 tomato plants perhaps we could sell a few hundred through the farmers market. Our heirloom tomato plants have been well received but still after three markets now our greenhouse looks just as full of tomato plants as when we started.... oh well that will mean plenty of ripe fruits in a few more months! You can look forward to Brandywine, Black Krim, Green Zebra, Striped German, Pruden's Purple, Cherokee purple, Sungold and Roma tomatoes in your CSA share! Hooray!
Also Big Lick Farm was blessed to receive funding through the Umpqua Community Development Corporation with a start up business grant. With this money we were able to get our tractor, 65 fruit trees, and our John Deere riding mower (photo above) with a small trailer that will save us many miles of walking each day as we move crops from the field into the pack shed by the time CSA season starts. Of course with extra machinery comes extra cost of mechanic services!
Last in the news for this posting is that we got our pump into the river! Pictured above is our neighbor/friend and farming guru Buck. We spent Thursday down at the banks of the river getting the pump in, primed and connected to the electric meter. Of course now that the rain has come again we have not had to rely on it too heavily yet but soon enough we will!
Have a great weekend! Don't forget our first CSA delivery will be June 4th!