Somewhere around 6am Thursday our phone will ring. It will be Wayne at the Post Office and he will be accompanied by cheeps and chirps. We are ready for the first 50 broilers of the season, a small batch designed to delight you with fresh chicken in approximately 8 weeks. Meanwhile they will spend their first few days in the barn garage, sure to delight us all with their fluff and flurry.
San Marzano Tomato seedlings
While at the Post Office earlier this week, dispatching soil and poop samples and collecting handles for the new wheel hoes, conversations depicted garden struggles of this wet Spring. Heading into a mid-May weekend we thought it would be good to brief you on the status of your gardens! When asked you can report that your potatoes are in (800 bedfeet in the new hilltop garden), onions too, parsnips seeded along with peas and early successions of carrots. On the peas though, some vole or other pesky friend has absconded with many planted seeds and the harsh rains have flushed others to the surface. So while the weather is perfect for peas, all is not perfect in peaville.
In addition to seeds, the potted up tomatoes did exactly as Liva expected, they popped. Just a short while in 4-inch pots in the greenhouse thickened their stems and tripled their height. In this proud state they now stand transplanted in the close hoop house, ready to receive water from the new whiz-bang irrigation system and to be clipped onto their trellis strings which await their reach. Out in the fields getting water the old fashioned way, and a lot of it, are your veronica cauliflower, kale, chard, beets, and if all goes well your Brussels sprouts will begin their slow growth toward glory in the great outdoors Thursday or Friday.
There, you are ready for the post office, grocery store, dump or social events of the
Planting potatoes
weekend and the almost inevitable topic of gardens. Pssst, try to avoid conversations about weeding the perennials, berry bushes or mulching the fruit trees…We’ll get to this!