Here’s some pictures of Keith foliar spraying the garden. Spray contains calcium, fish emulsion (2-3-1) for spring growth with seaweed, bio-magic and a bit of molasses. Other pictures of the garden that is starting to come around.
And our tomato plants with our cattle panel trellis system.
Memorial Day weekend for us is usually a very productive weekend. As you all know, we’ve been dealing with rain all week and snow and frost this weekend. The ground is too wet to plant anything so everything sits in the greenhouse, waiting…
We covered up the peppers last night (we had some planted) and we covered up the green beans. Covering up the 72 tomato plants that we had planted Friday morning was a bit more of a challenge having to deal with the windy conditions. We trelis our tomatoes on cow panels. We have about 70 feet we have to cover. We hauled our remay out that we had used earlier. What a battle trecking out there in the muck, sinking to our chins and then trying to tied the remay to the cattle panels while the wind was whipping around. I swear we had a parachute affect and if I was not holding on, I suspect I would have taken off in the wind. We managed to get it done. This morning it appears we did not get a frost and everything has survived. What a week of weather. I will leave you with this beautiful picture. While I was surveying the garden, it appears I should have worn my boots. Into the muck I go along with one of my shoes which I had to dig out. Gotta love it!
We thought we should post about what it takes to prepare a bed before we plant into it. For those of you who follow us, you know we feed our soil with nutrients that are severely lacking in many soils these days. Coincidentally, these same nutrients are also lacking in our bodies as well. By feeding the soil, the plants uptake these nutrients and when we consume these plants, we are getting all of the benefits that we put into the soil. It’s pretty neat. First up is a bucket of “black gold” our own compost. We spread this by hand with a shovel. One of us is in the tractor while the other shovels it out while the tractor slowly backs up. Next, we have a picture of the tractor (last Sunday before the rains came) and in the bucket of the tractor are several containers. Within each container is a different mineral. We have lime, gypsum, colodial phosphate, stonedust, sulfate of potash, menafee humates, boron and probooster. There is one more that looks like coal, but the name escapes me right now. All of these get sprinkled (in certain amounts) on each bed by hand (our future hope is to get some kind of mechanical spreader). After all of this is done, we rototil the top layer and if applicable we put down the plastic and irrigation tape. Throughout the summer, we will feed the soil with fish emulsion, calcium or phosphorus. As you can see it is quite the process to prepare a bed. We enjoy this work and really want to provide our customers with good, nutritious, tasty food the way it use to taste many, many years ago.
Got to play around with the new bed former/plastic layer today. Here we are preparing the beds before putting the plastic down. Here’s a picture where we started planting onions. 100 down only 1,100 more to go!
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