Sara here!

we have two weeks of farmers markets under our belt for this season so far! The Poulsbo market has pretty much doubled since last year, and it’s a whole new market! I’m now a raw goat milk convert, and can’t wait to try some locally made pasta! So far we’ve only had our overwintered kale, duck and chicken eggs and plant starts to offer, but it’s getting me super excited for the new season! The arugula and bok choi is looking good, we have some lettuce and spinach that is almost ready, and are transplanting (cilantro, leeks, onions, lettuce, parsnips, beets, kale, and chard) and seeding like mad (squash, melon, beans, greens, and beets) to get everything in. We mixed our own soil (3-4 parts compost, 3-4 parts topsoil, 1 part pearlite, 1 part vermiculite, and 1 part peat~~ water!) this year instead of buying pre-bagged seed starting mix and I must say that I’m liking the way it turned out. I’m also stoked to get the tomatoes in the greenhouses. We’ve run our chickens through them and I’m hoping that the extra nitrogen will be a benefit.

Our season is pretty short, and Jared and I are looking forward to getting some low tunnels up soon with the slitted row cover to hopefully extend the season. we used it before in our small garden’s raised beds, and liked the way it worked for those.

I will make a concerted effort to get some pictures of the market this next week and will get them up soon!

Well we just had another spring soaker, but before the rain I managed to get a bunch of ground work done and begin the regular outdoor plantings.  This spring has been warm, but its been wet.  My field was just barely dry enough, but I new there’d be more rain coming, so I went for it.  I started by mowing and disking the ~4.5 acres of cover crop and spreading lime over everything.  With only a few days for cover crop breakdown, I spread rock phosphate, some azomite, cow manure, and chicken… Read the rest of this article »

[slideshow id=135] Dear Blog Followers, It’s so good to be back here on the blog.   We have spent a lot of time this winter adjusting our lives to the wide range of changes that take place once a couple turns  together to a life of farming as their fulltime occupation.  Sara and I have been married just over a year, and for the last three years we’ve been tending the earth and planting seeds together, a life skill we completely lacked before that’s now an occupation for two rather than… Read the rest of this article »

Like all good things in life, I will tell this to my son, you must wait to reap the harvest. This is good advice, dad.  But geeze, 8 months?  is anything worth it.  I like the celery that I am eating now.  I seeded it in the greenhouse in mid-January (actually, Andrea did), planted it out in April.  You know, I wonder if I could have sped up its maturity with tons of water and fertilizer for those first few months, to have celery at the later part of June?  I know for sure that I didn’t… Read the rest of this article »

Well, after the freeze, we haven’t looked back.  We’ve been planting out peppers, eggplant - we even put out zucchini and cucumbers today. We’ve direct-seeded beans, planted out basil.  We’ve just gone to town with the summer stuff, and the cool weather stuff is just maturing. I am pushing the season.  I’m sure this is a classic first-year, wet-behind-the-ears mistake, but it is working so far The tomatoes are growing like gang-busters (assuming “gang-busters”… Read the rest of this article »