What's New At The Farm? 6/11/2008

Transplanting, that’s what’s new. Well, not really new, but we’re pretty busy doing it right now! Tuesday we did the pumpkin trial and workshop and part of the winter squash workshop and put floating row covers on the fields. Today we’ll finish the winter squash workshop, put row covers on and start on foundation line increases. By Friday we should be about 95% done planting; all we’ll have to do then is take care of all the crops we have in the ground. And plant the cover crops, and trim the trees around the farm fields, and do some work at some of the isolation fields, and so on.

The deer are currently eating the tomato trial so we’ll have to fence that in this week. We’ll use eight foot tall posts with Hortonova stapled to them. This will work for a while, hopefully until we get our new fence installed. Haven’t heard? Johnny’s has decided to have a deer exclusion fence installed around the farm. River Valley Fence Systems from Deerfield, Ma. will be here on July 7th to start the installation process on 5500 feet of eight foot high steel fence around the farm. The deer have given us headaches for years; eating our trial crops, destroying our breeding workshops and eating our seed productions.

The deer fencing is a permanent solution to a long standing problem. The estimated life span of the fence is at least 30 years. Pressure treated posts are used along with painted, galvanized woven steel fence. Deer have been a hot topic here for as long as I can remember and it will be nice not to have to spend any more time on this project. Well, not too much more. We still have bushes to cut and trees to trim, a small section of stone wall to move and I need to flag exactly where the fence is going to go. Probably should do that first.

The fence company will take 3-4 weeks to install the fence. They will be staying locally for a couple of weeks at a time.

Until next week, we’ll be in the field.
Brian