Down time....

We've been having many quiet days of late looking over seed catalogs and discussing what we should grow this coming season.  A few new items on our list that we plan to try out---scallions, escarole, a new dark purple carrot, padron peppers, crocosmia, a couple new asian greens for our CSA, a new red cherry tomato, romanesque cauliflower, and some new kinds of sweet corn.  I'm sure there is more on that list, but that is what comes to mind.  We seem to have trouble with our summer variety.  This past season our winter squash all bit the dust due to the squash vine borer, which wiped out several weeks worth of winter squash for our CSA. 
We're also in the process of writing thank you notes for our Christmas gifts.  Stuart gifted me with some lovely cards from Han Notes for our first year anniversary.  I fell in love with the art they use on their cards when I was out in Portland in September.  Wonder what an original piece costs. 

We've also had time to go to some thrift stores---found this great (albeit frilly) tank top for that rare summer occasion when we leave the farm to do something besides veggies and flowers.  

Can it be true?

We are going to the farm today to meet the propane fellas who are going to install our tank and fuel line for our greenhouse.  So potentially, we could turn on the greenhouse today!!!  We planted precooled tulips last week in crates and they would much prefer to be in the greenhouse rather than the hoophouse.  We also need to go ahead and start some seed for the season.  It is now time for cool season starts---lettuce, lots of spring flowers, echinacea (that we plan to plant along our southern border near the creek), maybe some collards and kale.  Pictured here are a few things gathered from the field.  We have more than we can eat but not quite enough to be worth going to market.  Our turnips in the field actually look alright, just not big enough for a sale yet.  I would say overall our winter gardening definitely needs work.  Yet it is an improvement over last year.  Except for our onions---our starts got ruined by Clover tramping all in the trays and rummaging for who knows what hidden in the depths of the two inches of soil.  We have some more started, but they won't be as big or as early as last season.  

There's a bluebird on my shoulder...

In the last house where we started our farm, we had a bluebird that would come to the living room window, attach itself to the screen on the outside, and chirrip and whistle and try as hard as it could to get someone's attention. It was the strangest thing. It did this all spring and summer one year. I would whistle to it as best I could, pretending to myself that it could decipher my off-key notes of curiosity and friendship. Bluebirds were everywhere on this last piece of land, thanks to the thoughtful owners who had put up houses for them. But this one male was particularly special. He would begin the day on a telephone wire that stretched above our kitchen window, all fluffed up with head slightly burrowed, eying the land and its offerings, then he would gracefully dip down onto the grass and peck around for some breakfast---only to return at some point to say hello at the living room window. I had a dream one night that a bluebird and I were whistling back and forth, back and forth, until eventually it landed upon my hands and then it turned into light. Hence the name, Bluebird Meadows.
We're trying to establish a thriving community of our little mascots on the farm. We've put up one house that I found at the thrift store, and we have big plans to spend a day or a half day building maybe twenty or so houses we can put all over the land. I've read the houses need to be on a post (the birds don't like their houses on a tree), two hundred feet apart (for territorial reasons), and facing south, southeast. We have already spied a few bluebirds checking out the nest to see if it fits their taste. We heard from a friend they won't nest in it until mid-March, but we're hoping they have already laid claim.

We all need heroes

This is a book written by a newfound hero I have, Diana Beresford-Kroeger. I first heard her speak on a Living-on-Earth program and I have been smitten ever since.  Her mind is a work of art; she even speaks fluent Gaelic.  This book details 20 trees found in the north temperate zone, all of which we should be able to plant somewhere on our land and most of which have medicinal and edible properties.  I was reading about honey locusts last night and it turns out that the eastern redbud tree (Cersis canadensis) is a relative of the locust with an interesting Christian oral history. The redbud is also called the Judas tree. Diana writes, "Jesus, before his death by crucifixion, was betrayed by his best friend, Judas Iscariot, who, anguished by the remorse of his action, hanged himself on a redbud tree....The history also holds a legend that the tree blushed with shame and was forever pink afterward." It turns out that Judas hung himself on a close relative of the eastern redbud, Cersis siliquastrum (found in Palestine), also known as the Judas tree.  

We have finally planted a couple trees on our property, thanks to a very thoughtful friend (Mark, you're the best!) who gifted me with two heirloom apple trees for my birthday.  They look very healthy and content next to the hoophouse, alongside the 70 ft row of daffodils we have planted.  I've been wanting to plant cherry trees and peach trees as there may not be anything more beautiful in the springtime than their blooms.  And honey locusts, redbuds, pawpaws, catalpas, pear trees, and any other lovelies needing a secure home for life.  

TAH-DAH!

Greenhouse is complete! We still need to double plastic the endwalls for extra insulation, get a propane tank delivered and set-up, have electricians wire up the house, build the tables for all the seedlings to go on, put down landscape fabric, etc. etc. But it feels done to us, and oh what a feeling.

Greenhouse work

Here we are drilling, framing, leveling, drilling, sawing, drilling. Our greenhouse is going to be so AWESOME! One of my brothers is coming out later today to help us lift the huge exhaust fan onto it's posts as well as the super heavy heater. I'd rather be figuring out how to grow cyclamen or something along those lines. However, having this house up and running should have a huge, positive impact on our growing season this year. We thought we would have this done by the end of Nov. Maybe too much racquetball??? There is also a picture in here of the great dilapidated house that is on our property that we currently use as a storage space/barn. We're not quite sure what to do with it---another project, another day.

Sowing the seed

This picture is from a week ago. We have sown arugula, lettuce mix, turnips, radishes, and beets for winter market. We saved two beds so we can have some veggies in late Feb./March as well. It's hard to time all this stuff, especially as it has been so cold this Dec. We've actually been under the weather with a head cold for the past week. While our greenhouse waits, patiently waits. We have sown white clover (already germinating!) in between our rows in the hoophouse---the seed is so fine and so much smaller than crimson clover. we've never worked with white clover before so we're hoping this isn't a bad move. time shall tell!

Taking it to the courts

So the cat's out of the bag; we love racquetball. We can even hold conference calls between games to get business done, just like in all those eighties movies (remember Wall St. with Charlie Sheen?) We are missing the cool clothes though. We played three games....I should've won all three, but I only won one. I think it was rigged somehow. I did get a victory dance in, as pictured below. Stuart's victory dance consisted of a leap against the wall; he's trying to recall the name of the breakdancing move this jump replicates as we speak. If you're looking for something to help you deal with winter angst, racquetball may be the answer. not that I think winter angst ever goes away, not until the redbuds and forsythia start blooming---but we've got to try something to cope.

Ransom Visits

This past week we had the pleasure of having Stuart's younger brother Ransom help us out for a couple days on the farm. We finished seeding and mulching our driveway, spread gravel over our greenhouse floor so that water drains properly, and planted 750 daffodils. Daffodils take so much longer to plant than tulips or iris because they need 6 in centers. We originally wanted to put them in our landscape somewhere, but efficiency won out as usual and we planted them in a boring row next to our new hoophouse. We're hoping the squirrels don't get desperate and dig up the bulbs for food. They were the last of the bulbs so now we can move on to finishing our greenhouse. We all went to go see Synecdoche, NY, the new film by Charlie Kaufmann. Do yourself a favor--spare your mind the torture. The owner/manager of the theater was walking out as we were entering. He excitedly told us it is the best film of 2008 and gave us some food for thought before going in--"At the end of the movie think about what you thought the plot was at the beginning of the movie, and then ask yourself, What happened?" Not surprisingly, he also said there had been quite a few people walking out of this movie.

Dogsitting Ruby