Just Another Day at the Farm...

June 9-13.

This week at STOGROW we’ve been continuing planting, weeding, trellising, and working on special projects. Nearly all of the vegetables are planted leaving only a few more tomatoes (destroyed in the recent cow rampage). New plants in the ground this week included basil, onions, green peppers and winter squash. These were all transplants from the greenhouse; the seeds were planted earlier this spring. We planted two basil varieties, one of which has a beautiful purple color. As Abby and Rob have an extreme love for basil, they were very excited. In fact, they couldn’t stop smelling it as they planted. The onion transplants were a new addition this year. Onion seeds were planted last year, but not much amounted from them. We’re hoping for greater onion success. Seeds planted this week included beets, radishes, and carrots.

The weather this week was cooperative for the most part. The heavy rains and strong thunderstorms Wednesday night left the ground soggy and too wet to walk on Thursday morning. The afternoon on Thursday, however, followed with warm sunshine and enough heat to dry up the soil and allow a few of the farmers to do some work.

A new project on the farm is a raised flowerbed on the east side, near the newly planted carrots. We took some old tires that were piled around the greenhouse, filled them with compost and arranged them in an arc, planting four or five flowers in each tire. The flowers planted were statice mixes and impatiens. A big heap of compost was added on the west side to house some transplants. (A few plants that were in the flower bed by the greenhouse were overtaking the smaller flowers, so we decided to make a raised flower bed elsewhere to accommodate their larger size.) The new raised flowerbed was complimented with a hedge of rocks to keep the soil in formation and add a little decoration, as well.

The chickens are still doing well. Rob and Tom made a new portable hut (aka chicken tractor, as Rob likes to call it) for the chickens last week during a rainy day. This hut is a little more structurally sound and allows for the chickens to have even more access to parts of the farm and time outside of their main coop. As usual, they accompany Rob wherever he goes and they like to visit us while we plant, making sure they do a good job of weeding, fertilizing, and taking little nibbles at the earthworms and other insects.