Thursday, March 29, 2012

In the News!

The St. Catharines Standard wrote a little diddly about us in the paper yesterday. Here is the link to the article to read it yourselves: Local Farm to Help Food Bank

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Business Cards

Well it has been a pretty quiet week so far. Last Saturday was the busiest in the last few days as we took out all the fence post from our sheep fencing. The yard looks a lot different now that it is all open. This year that area will be full of veggies which will look great.
Today we got some new business cards as well. We had some last year but these are a new design and much nicer I think. Any suggestions for improvements let us know as we only got 100 to start.

Front

Back

And We're Back!

Some of you may have noticed our website and blog have been up and down over the last couple of days.  We were making some technical changes behind the scenes which caused a few disruptions.  Needless to say we are back on track and hoping to have some fresh news soon!

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Growing outside

Well today after a nice wander through the fields it was easy to see that the early spring is causing some growth out in the fields. The first thing which we knew was growing is garlic. The bulbs already have significant portion growing above the ground. I tried to look up when our garlic sprouted last year but I couldn't find a date so its hard to say how far ahead we are from last year.

Garlic well on its way!


Also arriving out in the field are all the annual herbs that we have planted. A lot of them stayed nice all winter such as oregano and thyme. Others are coming back with a vengeance. As part of spring prep today we trimmed the herbs and cleared any weeds away from them allowing optimal growth.


Garlic chives coming up out of the ground 

 As part of our herb trimming process we also have a few catnip plants that needed to be trimmed back. While things went smoothly at first our two cats (oats and beans) decided that they should get involved.


This is my plant



No really back off, its mine

Where cats go after catnip

Bean having a go at oats leftovers
Needless to say it is not easy to trim catnip plants when two cats are trying to eat the plants that you trimming. After three plants we gave up on the rest.
Our other project today was putting up a divider in the chicken pen. The purpose of the divider is so that we can plant some pasture mix for the chickens to eat. The plan is to keep the chickens out until there is a good amount of pasture growing on the other side off the divide. Otherwise they would just eat the seed and anything that happened to grow out be consumed before it could grow to any decent size. The divide is not finished yet but this is how it looks so far,

Putting t-posts in to support a length of chicken wire

T-posts in. On the left you can kind of see a  hole in the ground. We will put some straw bales here, otherwise the chicken just walk under the wire.

Here the chicken wire is up. You can maybe see the hole better still on the left. That Ryan's homemade post pounder there on the ground.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Back in the swing of things!

Well as of today we have filed up our heat bench in the greenhouse. The bench holds 38 trays and each tray contains 72 plants. My dad and have actually become very proficient at planting the trays and it really only takes us a couple of hours to do 38 trays.
Our current planting includes the following: Broccoli, Cauliflower, Leeks, Celery, Eggplant, Kale, Tomatillo's and a selection of herbs. The herbs are the easiest thing to plant as we want more than one plant to grow in each cell so we just sprinkle some seeds into each one. With all the veggies we are more particular and only want one seed per cell. This can be very tricky with things such as celery that has tiny little seeds like the head of a pin. Honestly I'm sure when they are that small there is more than one going into each cell.


Planted trays. You can see a little white thermometer to the left. It was almost 40 today in the greenhouse.

The more time consuming part of the planting process is cleaning the heat bench after being unused all winter. Generally there is just some dirt that need to be swept up and luckily we had already done this. However we do have a low spot in the very middle of the bench where we always have problems with water collecting especially after it rains. Well I knew there was some water we need to get off the bench so on our way to the greenhouse we stopped and picked up a sponge to soak up the water.


I know pretty nice sponge eh! It was even made in Canada.

Well little did I know that what I thought was just going to be a little bit of water turned out to be a 1.4 of a bucket full of green slimy water with lots of dirt. I ended up using the above pictured container with the sponge to collect the water. The sponge was pretty nasty looking but the above picture is post cleaning. Pretty good I thought.

Nice sludge water from the table. Probably would be great on the garden.

Post water removal on the table. You can see that the sand under the plastic is also wet.
On a belated note our winter CSA is finished now. We feel like it went well over all and are looking forward to our summer session which will begin in June!

These were the baskets that went out on our the last week. Full of tasty food all from our farm.