food to ground

two days of planting, and the job is done.  food in the ground, and it feels fantastic.  just shy of four thousand baby plants.  hand to baby, baby to earth, water to join.  thanks to the help of our awesome volunteers, the work was a pleasure.  

 

thankfully, we weren't the only one hard at work:

off to savannah now for two days of learning and pleasure at the georgia organics conference.  epic keynote speaker, vandana shiva, tops it off tomorrow night.  catch you on the flip side.   

look at 'dem wingtips!

aftter just one week on property--seven days!--these birds are almost double in size and completely different looking.  check it:

day one:

today, seven days later:

burning that midnig...err, eight pm, oil

either our hoop house is about to take off, and return back to its home planet, or everything is totally fine, and the chicks are all good.

in perfect formation, a few foot wide circle beneath the lights, sleeping soundly.  it's dropping down to freezing tonight--thirty two--so working late planting beets turned out to be a hidden blessing as i was given the easy chance to check the birds well after dark.  had they been piled up on top of each other, reaching for the lamps, i would have known they were too cold.  scattered far and wide, too hot.  wide circle--that's the money spot.

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wet days

a rainy couple days, just in time to screw ya.  there’s tradeoffs, for everything, of course.  while rainy days mean the fields are too wet to work, rainy days also means our cow pasture is greening up a little quicker, getting ready to receive the herd a little sooner.  but at this moment, as thousands of fragile baby plants are arriving from the nursery, a rainy couple days feels like a hindrance.

this weekend is the georgia organics conference in savannah, and we are trying to get these plants in the ground before we head down south.  yet another reminder of what has happened this year.  when I moved down here in February of last year, the georgia organics conference was one of the first things I experienced.  a total greenhorn.  the rook.  and now, here I am, heading down to the georgia organics conference with farmer root, my co-manager of our very own vegetable farm.  I need to remind myself of these things to help calm my sometimes-debilitating confusion.  you know what j, you’ve never done this before, maybe you should be confused.  there you go, hush now little farmer—hushhh.

there’s been a ton happening, and a ton yet to happen.  somewhere in between those two is me, sorting it out best I can.  our spinach seeds all germinated well, but the tiny seedlings all died by a process called damping off, which is associated with you guessed it—being just a little too damp.  a bit of a rookie maneuver, but we’ll survive. 

carrot seedlings are just starting to snake their little blades through the sandy soil, the radishes and beets look strong.  a few beds of lettuce mix were planted too deeply due to my inexperience with using a seeder, so farmer root replanted those beds by hand.  everything has tradeoffs—remember—the seeder is quick and efficient when used properly (but a waste when used wrong).  root’s hand seeding method is a pretty painful backbreaker, and the possibility of wasting seed (in comparison to the machine) is higher.  however, farmer root’s hand to seed, seed to earth technique is one we can feel and trust with our hands and our eyes, and take confidence that the seeds are planted properly.

the baby chicks are growing by the minute.  where once lay only small puffy down hairs to keep the chicks warm now full colored feathers are beginning to bud.  their size and strength and abilities change by the day.  and soon, they will be out on the pasture, living the good life.

one hundred and fifty chicks first day at school

what an amazing thing.  one hundred and fifty peeping little puffs of feather—all in  a box—and waiting at the post office like an amazon shipment.  much like everything else on the farm, things that sound simple inevitably turn into complex challenges.  after debating back and forth on what sort of structure to build to house the baby chicks, we decided to go with one similar to what we saw over at darby farms earlier in the week.

we spent two days clearing out a cluttered green house, building a wall, enclosing the place with chicken wire, filling it with hay and bedding, and rigging up a lighting system.

our biggest concern, after containing the chicks in a dry, warm environment, is to prevent predators from snacking their way through our flock.  rats, our biggest concern, can enter without much effort and pick off baby chicks—one by one—without much detection.

the video below is an overview of the two days leading up to our chicks arrival, as well as their pickup at the post office, their arrival at the farm, and their first feed and water.     



peep, peep

today's visit to darby farms was well worth the drive.  after seeing dan's simple, clean, and easy-to-manage greenhouse brooder model, we chalked our initial plans of building a stand alone wooden structure with a tin roof, and decided to clear out a section of our greenhouse instead.

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