Sunday, it was about dark. Ellie was at church practicing for the Good Friday play and Levi was playing video games in the basement. I barked at him from the top of the stairs “EGGS”. He went and gathered them and then came back and started writing . I thought it was a reminder to remember to gather eggs or an apology for forgetting to gather eggs. Nope. This is what it said.

Dear Mommy + Daddy, I’ve decided to go to the greenhouse until someone comes over and convince me to come back. p.s. It is about the stupid eggs! sincerely, your son Levi

I gave him a 1/2 hour and went over to the greenhouse. Told him I understood, cleaning eggs sucks. Boring work. I offered that he could help us in the garden for two hours each day as soon as he got off the bus. He declined. I said, well, you can tote two 5 gallon buckets of feed each to the pullets and laying hens each day. He said he was not strong enough. A bucket of feed weighs 30 lbs so two would weigh almost as much as Levi. I told him that was not a problem, he could use multiple buckets and make 5-6 trips. He decided that he would stick with gathering and cleaning eggs because it was something he was kind of good at…

I failed to mention this to Jenifer and she came behind me and watered the greenhouse washing off stuff I had just applied. .

Totally my fault, I just grunt most days until noon except on Saturdays when I have to talk.

Then we went to spot spray the the potatoes with Spinosad.

Another biological insecticide that has a very low toxicity to beneficial insects and does an awesome job. Jenifer and I each had a 1/2 gallon hand-held sprayer and covered 3/4 of an acre of potatoes… We are going to have a lot of potatoes in 2-3 weeks.

It was already 10:30 am and Jenifer headed off to harvest for the CSA and I went to my dad’s shop to try and get our Howard Rotavator back together.

Our tiller is 19 years old and flew apart last fall. We welded it for the short-term in April, then it flew apart again. I thought I was going to have to buy some very expensive West German machined parts but my dad looked at it, knew a guy close by with a machine shop set up in an old chicken house and for $150, I am back in business.

I got educated getting that machine back together… I am no mechanic. I was covered in hydraulic oil, gear oil, lock-tite, and gasket making material. Heck of a headache from sniffing those fumes. Took me all day and around 5:30, I was able to run a pass through a section of the garden with the tiller and apparently, I got it back together in the correct order..

We have been without the tiller for over a month and that has hurt us. I had hoped that I could just till all the areas of the garden that needed working, but after that one pass with the tiller, I decided it all needed bush-hogging first. So I bush-hogged till dark. Jenifer was doing ball practice with Ellie and Levi. She made home made cornbread with onions and opened a can of beans. Good enough for me.

After supper, I sat down at the kitchen table with our “new’ used laptop. A good friend of ours who is in the equipment leasing business brought it by the Matthews Farmer’s market last Saturday and handed it to Jenifer. I am not positive, but I think we traded a pastured Thanksgiving turkey for the laptop. It is an IBM thinkpad. It took me 10 minutes to figure out how to turn it on.

I felt kind of silly sitting at the supper table at 10:30 pm in grease covered pants trying to figure out the workings of a laptop. I probably should just hand it over to Ellie or Levi and let one of them show me how it works.

Tuesday, I spent all day potting up young transplants of eggplants and peppers into 4.5″ X 4. pots. Why do I mention this? We used to transplant the plants directly from the flats into the garden. They did ok. We have found though that if we take the time and spend the money on large peat pots, it is well worth the effort.
Instead of subjecting a small transplant straight from a 72-cell flat to our red clay soil, we pot them up. A 4.5″ X 4″ peat pot surrounds the plug with about 8 times the volume of excellent growing medium as opposed to sticking them straight in the ground.

Our transplant potting mix consists of Fafard 3B (peat moss, bark, vermiculite), Black Cow compost, worm castings, and is amended with a complete 5-3-4 organic fertilizer, azomite, a volcanic rock dust, and lime.

It is more work to transplant the large peat pots but eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes are long term crops that have the potential to keep producing until first frost. It pays to take a little extra effort on the front end.

Wednesday

It was an interesting and fun day!
CSA members Joe and Jonathan showed up to work.

We were in clean-up mode and Joe and I started working on an eyesore, the hay wagon from hell piled with junk setting right across the driveway from the greenhouse.

Jonathan helped Jenifer clean up the greenhouse and set in to potting up tomato plants.

The hay wagon was loaded with junk that I had not used in 3 years. I save everything. Joe was making fun of me, holding up 8″ pieces of rotting of 2 x4’s asking if he could toss it. I had to think, those pieces of wood would make great small wheel scotches.

I love it when CSA workshares show up. Jenifer goes out of her way to feed them. Wednesday, she made an arugula salad with FL. blood oranges, and Rooti the pig country ham. Awesome!

Joe and I took the eyesore hay wagon down to just the running gear. We piled the junk either on the trash pile or burn pile and then used wrenches, hammers, crow-bars and the front-end loader of the tractor with a chain attached to remove the old timber..

I am good taking stuff apart, it is putting it back together that I have always had a problem with.

Denise is a CSA member and closet farmer. She secured a grant to via a program that was designed to help farmers move to more viable income streams.

Her grant involves using glycerin, a by-product of bio-fuel production as a fuel burned in a waste-oil burner to heat farm buildings. Rich and Mike are doing the engineering on the project.

Denise chose our greenhouse as part of the pilot project. We are thankful and excited to be a part of the pilot program.

Last Wednesday, as we were getting close to finishing garlic planting, I reminded Levi that he had a bunch of onion sets to plant.

David of Renfrow’s Hardware in Matthews gave his old stock of red and white onions, along with some shallots from last fall to Levi to plant and make some money. Some were dried out and a few were moldy, but most were in great shape.

Levi was not too keen on the idea until I ran the numbers and told Levi he could make a couple 100 dollars if he planted the onions and took care of them.

Levi hopped of the couch with dollar signs in his head. I showed him what to do and he planted the onion sets with mechanical precision. I was impressed.

I asked Ellie if she wanted to be involved with this venture and she declined and informed me she will be growing zinnias and sunflowers to sell.

Although Ellie is only 10, this will be her 4th year selling flowers.

Gathering Eggs on a Saturday Afternoon In the Rain

After the normal frowning and whining, Ellie and Levi went to gather eggs in the rain. I was messing around in the greenhouse when I heard them coming back from the chickens and and both of them were counting. I had to go see why. They were counting the earthworms crossing the driveway in the rain. 142 of them in about a 50 yard stretch.

Greenhouse Raised Beds

We do not heat our greenhouse but it is a micro-climate. Even on a 40 degree day, it will heat up and the fans are set to come on at 85 degrees, and they do.

Last week, we built three 80 foot long by 3 foot wide beds in the greenhouse amended with well-rotted horse manure, greensand, volcanic rock dust, and a complete organic fertilizer.

Monday and Tuesday, we filled up those beds with transplants. The transplants were supposed to go outside, but the recent rains changed that. We planted Red Russian and Tuscan kale in one bed, spicy greens in another, and arugula and pac choi in the 3rd bed.

The fourth bed is a mess. It is only two foot wide because it is against the east wall of the greenhouse and is invaded with bermuda grass creeping in from outside of the greenhouse. It also had plenty of curly dock.

I detest bermuda grass but I don’t mind the curly dock. I don’t appreciate it in the greenhouse but it serves a purpose. It has has a huge tap roots that reaches down into the subsoil and pulls up nutrients.

I saved all the dock I dug up to add to the compost pile.

While shoveling up the curly dock, I came across a small toad hibernating about 4 inches deep in the ground. He was shell-shocked to say the least. We had a two gallon clay pot sitting around and I knocked out a chunk of the lip of the pot to make an entrance and turned the pot upside down for a toad house next to Levi’s cabbage.

All the 3rd graders at Ellie and Levi’s school got a cabbage plant from Bonnie Plant Farm in Alabama. Levi planted his at the end of one of the beds in the greenhouse.

Goose Eggs

Our lone goose Gretchen started laying eggs this week. So far, she has laid two. We don’t know if they are fertile or not though because our two ganders, Frick & Festus, the Clampett brothers don’t seem to pay her much attention. They spend most of their time honking and hissing and strutting about. If they had taxes they had forgot to pay, they would be a shoe-in for Congress.

We use a hard plastic flat with 72 cells made by Winstrip. We have about 80 of those and ran out of them Tuesday. We switched to trays with 3 inch peat pots in them until we ran out of those. We hunted around and found some used plastic 4-pack and 6-pack seedling containers and put them in trays and kept sowing until we ran out of table space. It was amazing how much 4 people can get planted in a day.

We don’t heat our greenhouse because the propane costs would be prohibitive. On a sunny day with temperatures in the 40’s, the greenhouse will easily heat up into the 80’s. It cools down quickly though at night.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, we are expecting temperatures around 22-23 degrees. We will take the flats of seeds off the tables and set them on the ground in the greenhouse to take advantage of the natural heat sink of the earth. We will cover the flats with insulation board and blankets.

We won’t be planting outside anytime soon. Aftert 1.6 inches of rain Wednesday, everything is squishy.