Still Raining

Yep, it's still raining. It started raining Saturday night (fortunately after we'd done our work at the farm), and hasn't really stopped since. It's been getting into the high 30s at night, and the snow level is pretty low. It's 47 right now at midday... sigh.

Very little is blooming except the very first wintery plants, such as these violets.

The seeds in the starter box are coming along nicely. The second set, planted a week ago, are sprouted.

Karen's are up too.

And the lettuces, at about 2 weeks are sturdy.

We went to the Organic Gardening class on Sunday out at the Grange. That is an interesting old building, and it was fun to see who came to the class. A lot of people were "our age" i.e. older, but I guess that's to be expected. Older folks have more land and leisure for gardening.

The two speakers had slightly different approaches. The flower farmer had different needs than the fruit tree farmer. The fruit farmer tested his land regularly and added precise amounts of amendments. He also avoids tilling. The flower farmer builds his soil by plowing in his flower stalks and using cover crops, which means lots of tilling. He also relies on the look of his plant to tell him if he needs to amend. It was interesting because both approaches have a lot of validity, and probably work best for each farmer's particular crop.

One thing I was sad to hear them agree on is that mulch provides good habitat for slugs/snails, earwigs, and sowbugs, all of which we have in abundance. I don't want to give up the mulch, so I'm hoping the chickens will help. We don't have enough room to put some areas in cover crop, but we do have land that isn't gardenable that we can use to make compost on. So we'll build our humus that way. Because we have very limited land, but plenty of labor, we can use approaches that wouldn't make sense over a larger farm.

They talked about a good organic amendment mix: Three-quarters cottonseed meal, and the rest a mix of alfalfa meal, kelp meal, and bat guano. The flower guy said he loves kelp because it puts in so many trace elements. The bat guano is only if extra nitrogen is needed. We won't have a problem having a nitrogen source once we get the chicken manure composting. But I think we should get this stuff and amend with it.

We can also bring dirt samples to the next class to get them tested. That is... if it ever gets dry enough to take the sample!