Spring Farm Updates

Spring is sure arriving in full force now! Despite that extremely early start (the daffodils were in bloom in early April) things seem to have slowed down a bit and everything seems to be a little bit closer to average right now. There are a ton of farm projects that I'll tell you about as I get the chance, the biggest ones are the new greenhouse, the new yurt and of course all the seed expansion. I'm planting a bigger area than ever for seeds this year, two of the three garden areas on the farm have been greatly expanded. I just came in from seeding all 16 cereal grain varieties for this year, and the 35 new lettuces we planted last week are all sprouting in the loamy Nictaux soil (lettuce seeds were big this year so I'm growing as many as I can for 2011). The peas are all in now too, I've got almost 100 varieties on the go including some extremely rare ones like Monster, Prince Edward and Gravedigger. Now we just need some rain...

The other week we tilled, leveled, seeded and rolled two new hay meadows. One was seeded last year but the ground was so lumpy from the plowing work that we had to re-do it this spring (otherwise mowing would be nearly impossible), we had a tractor in to have it tilled then by hand we raked flat all the furrows and rolled the seeds in with a borrowed push-roller (thanks to our wwoofer Greg for the many hours of rolling!). It's looking nice and primed to start sprouting now, I really can't wait until we can start scything up there.

The house is full of seedlings in various states of growth and the new greenhouse is slowly coming along to provide some much needed extra space. The anchor posts are all set but I haven't had the time yet to move on to assembling the frame, updates to come!

As you can see from the photos the yurt frame is totally finished now too. I've just spent a couple of days over at Little Foot Yurts getting all the angles and dimensions right, it's so exciting to see it finally coming together! The canvas will be ready for it on Sunday, I'll have more photos and details real soon...

Seedy Friday photos!

Sorry for the lack of action on the blog as of late, there have been so many exciting projects on the go I can't stop to write about them! Now that my winter seed season is winding down and the much more interesting to write about farming season is sprouting back into the forefront I hope to be a bit more active on here again.

Here are the photos from Seedy Friday on April 30th, it was the first event of it's kind in Middleton and it went better than I ever could have hoped for! It was tied in with the Middleton Farmers' Market so it had that existing energy to build on, we ended up having all the local Maritime seed growers represented and an active seed trading table. Gilberte Doelle and her crew came up from Wild Rose Farm down Digby way and were a big hit with seedlings and Hope Seeds and the earliest greens around out of her high-tunnel. Pumpkin Moon Farm came out too to round out the local seed-scene. We ended up having almost 30 people attend the garden talks (myself on seed saving and Dan Moore on creating healthy soil), we had a good sized room booked for it but it was packed. I can't wait to grow on the event for next year, I can really feel the seed saving movement catching on more than ever in the community.