This week on the farm we’re preparing everything for spring planting. This includes maintenance on all of our machinery too! It’s better to do the oil changes & repairs now instead of putting it off to late spring when we’re in a time crunch.
We’ll be moving our Jersey cow to a new pasture with the Dexter bull, so finishing the pasture fence is our first priority.
The layer chickens have been enjoying their dry coop, but we need to coax them outside to eat the bugs in the orchard. They haven’t been too happy about the constant rain this week, but the good news is they love new grass so that should encourage them to roam around outside of their coop.
We’ve gotten some plans together for a bunny tractor too. This is great for our rabbits because they would love to munch on the new spring grasses coming up, but they need protection from predators. The bunny tractor is similar to a chicken tractor because it keeps the foxes out but the rabbits get to live free range on pasture.
We’re buying layer chicks in a few days too, so our egg production stays up. Some of our older layers are a few years old, so their production has slowed down. The new layers will be Rhode Island red, Araucana, and maybe Golden & Black Sexlink. They’ll need heat lamps at first, but unlike Cornish Cross meat chicks, they’ll be hardy enough to take off the heat lamps in a few days. They should start laying in about 6 months.
The weather has been mild so the honey bees will be flying as soon as we get more sun. We need to get into their hives to check any winter damage and ofcourse feed them what’s left of last season’s honey. We’ll be getting new nukes in later spring, depending on when our supplier trucks them up from the south. Stay tuned!
The greenhouse didn’t sustain too much damage from the winter storms so we really just need to repair the doors. Once that’s finished we’ll continue growing spring greens like lettuce, early kale (Red Russian), and spring onions. We ‘ll be adding more finished compost to the raised beds in the greenhouse over the next month. Last season was great particularly because of the compost we added to the greenhouse. It made for an abundant early harvest.
We’ve planted the garlic a little late this year, but it should be ready for green garlic harvest in a couple months.
It would be great to get some ducks again for slug control. Because it’s such a mild early spring, the slugs will probably be out of control! The difficulty with lettings ducks roam around the garden is the local owl population. We’ve noticed that organic duck is considered a delicacy by Barred owls that live in our woods! But it’s easy enough to hand remove the slugs early in the morning. Another favorite is to place a shallow tray of beer in the aisles of the garden, the slugs are attracted to the beer and then they drown in it. It’s not a bad way to go.
We’ll be taking care of our potato order in a few days, and we’ve placed our order with Territorial Seed company for the remaining seeds for the season. We’re really looking forward to items like joi choi (Asian greens), kale ofcourse, and early tomatoes. We probably won’t plant too many cherry tomatoes this year because the harvest time is too much. We encourage people to have a cherry tomato plant of their own because they’re relatively easy to take care of. Sometimes we even include a cherry tomato plant with the first share.
Chives will be weeded this month and fertilized, they can never be weeded too much!
We’ve started the application process to become certified organic/biodynamic, & we’re hoping to complete that by this season. And finally, our biogas digester has been dormant for the winter but we’ll have an update in a few weeks.
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