You know that day when you wake up and it seems like the world turned green overnight? That day is finally here! I love it! I'm not fooled, I know we could still get another snowstorm, but spring is here! My seeds are ordered...(I'm a seed catalog junkie by the way. I TRY and limit myself, but there are always so many neat things I want to try and grow). I've got some tomatoes and broccoli started on the front porch in yogurt cups, and I even planted some onion seeds out in the garden. I've never grown onions from seeds, I've always ordered sets, so it will be fun to see what happens.
In other news around the farm, our egg supply has been drastically reduced. We went from 9 hens to 3 hens in a matter of about 4 days. It seems that we have an entrepreneurial fox or something living here. He heard about the egg business and wanted a piece of the pie (chicken). If I see him posting any signs on our road for "farm fresh eggs" I might have to pay him a little visit....... Seriously though, he could have at least been nice enough to take the rooster instead of all hens. That's just greedy. Friday we planted our cover crop on the two acres we rent from the neighbor. We consulted with a local seed dealer who specializes in cover crops and he suggested a mix of oats, sweet peas, and radishes. Our goal is to disk some of the crop in as green manure to introduce more nitrogen before we plant our sweet corn. The other half of the cover crop we are going to let grow and run our chicken tractor on it so they can fertilize the soil for next year and enjoy the bugs (although, now we are going to have to get more chickens)! Speaking of cover crops, I realized one of the hard things about starting up a farm is not always having the proper equipment you need to do the job. It's hard to justify buying a lot of farm equipment when you haven't started to see the benefits yet. So, we try and make do with what we have..... for example, a drill, or a spreader/harrow combo sure would have been nice for planting our cover crop. Instead, we borrowed Steve's dad's lawn seeder and pushed it by hand. Then we made a makeshift harrow out of an old fence and some chains. If that isn't redneck enough, we pulled it behind the pickup because ol' Minnie (our Minneapolis Moline tractor) was broken...... again. Just to make sure the neighbors had something to talk about, the kids and I rode on the tool box of the pickup while Steve drug the "harrow" around. Thanks to the good Lord, though, we were blessed with some timely rain so that redneck cover crop might just stand a chance of growing. In addition to sweet corn and cover crops, I am planting a variety of sunflower hybrids on some of our rented ground. I think it would be really fun to do either a flower CSA, grow flowers for a local florist, or even have bride-to-be's come out and get flowers for their wedding! This idea is just in the beginning stages, but let me know if there is any interest..... I think having a new set of fresh cut flowers in your house every week would be such a beautiful, yet simple tradition. Or you could buy a flower CSA share for mom for mother's day! huh, I just thought of that.....not too bad of an idea.....
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