Weekend Help

Josh's parents and some of his siblings came to spend the weekend at our farm.  They sell CSA shares in Milaca, MN and have a lot of experience vegetable farming.  It was nice to have the extra hands to help out on a few projects and the extra advice.  Many hands definitely make light work!

We pulled the straw mulch off of the strawberry rows.  We can already see some of the green leaves of the plants popping up.

50ft x 100ft strawberry plot planted last spring.  This will be the first year of harvest.

Growing Strawberry Plant

We tilled and cleaned some sod pieces out of the rows where we plan to plant sweet corn this summer.  We plan to plant raspberries there next spring, but for now it just gives us extra room to plant veggies.

Tilled rows that will be planted to sweet corn this year.

We put up some posts that will become the summer laying hen home.  We are putting these chickens out in the pasture here, so they can do our tilling for us.  We hope to plant a plot of asparagus there next spring.

Posts placed for future summer chicken pen.

Here is our "paddock".  When we moved in there was a wooden paddock fence surrounding this area where previous owners must have had livestock.  This is our most fertile garden.  The laying hens are in the background and the rhubarb row is in the foreground (covered in the row of straw mulch).  We have spent the warm weekends tearing down the old fence this spring.  We're hoping that if we keep the area around this garden cleaned up and mowed, we'll have less of a weed problem.

Paddock

Josh and his dad, Roger, bent some metal pipes that we plan to use as frames for row covers.  These new row covers will allow us to plant earlier and protect them from insect problems.  They brought the first pipe to the house garden to see what it would look like and envision the row covers over lettuce rows.  We will plant lettuce, spinach, and radishes in the house garden.  There are herbs planted (under the straw) in the background and strawberries (under the straw) in the foreground.

Roger and Josh in house garden.

Bent pipe frame for row cover.

The chives are growing well.  Soon they will be tall enough to start harvesting.  They continue to grow throughout the spring and early summer and can be harvested numerous times.

Chives

Here is the row of rhubarb.  We uncovered the plants this weekend and found that they are just starting to peak out of the soil.

Rhubarb Row

Rhubarb leaves poking out of the ground.

The plants in our little dining room greenhouse are all growing well.  We plan to start the tomato seeds this week.

This is our pasture garden.  It is 50ft x 190ft.  Our 1-year-old daughter, Lu-Lu, is in the wagon for a size comparison.

Pasture Garden

This is the straw that we will use for mulching the gardens this spring.  We mulch between the rows soon after the plants start to come up.  The mulch keeps the weeds out and the moisture in the soil.

Straw