So...it's the first day of spring! What is going on at the farm, you ask?

Well, it is a busy, busy time of year here!!!

We have weeded and fertilized the kale that made it through our warm winter. It is looking beautiful and is about to take off again!  Now to remove the hoops for the row cover so we can go through and cultivate between rows with the tractor....

We have ordered potatoes and the onion sets have already arrived.  Sweet potato slips should arrive in May.  Our transplants for kale, swiss chard, pac choi, and our first rotation of lettuce is already sown and will be ready for the field in early April.  It will only be a few thousand seedlings....anybody want to help plant?  

Oh yeah, but first we have to finish removing the irrigation lines from the fall crop and rip and rotovate the soil, space the rows correctly for our tractor, put the irrigation lines back down, and purchase the fertilizer for these transplants.  

And among...we are still inoculating a few hundred mushroom logs for shiitake, golden and grey oysters, and a reishi "stumps" which have to be buried.  Any help is greatly appreciated!  There will be two opportunities this week to come out and experience what it is like to inoculate mushroom logs - and it is not that hard!  We take all that part out for you, you just get the fun part!  See the flyer below for more information.  

That's all the projects I can think of tonight.  More that I have forgotten will come to me as I fall asleep, I am sure!

The kids seem most interested in their latest "mud lake" they have created in the front yard, complete with a bridge to provide safe crossing out of reach of the alligators.  And they are also in our new chicks that arrived in the mail a couple weeks ago.  The chicks are a mix of roosters for the frying pan, and last year's roosters got old and grew up to be not so fun, so we expect to be able to process them when the time comes.  For now though, these chicks get to be carried around in baskets, taken out for exercise and training in the chicken tractor they will later inhabit, zoomed around individually like airplanes (complete with added sound effects), and fed only the finest collection of gluten-free home-ground grains, kiddo leftovers, dried mealworms, and scrounged up grubs and grasshoppers.  They are all pretty happy really - chicks and kids alike.