What's New At The Farm - 9/03/2008

I'm back………………….

All is well on the farm; the remaining crops look good, pests and weeds have been controlled and now we advance on to harvesting.

I went for a tour (self guided) Tuesday morning upon my return from vacation. I could find little that needed to be done but still found a page and a half of what I called "Fun things to do around the farm". Well, in reality, many of them aren't fun, but they're not that bad either. Mostly things to do that fit in the "If we had time" category. Things like:

Installing padlocks on the fuel tanks – with the price of fuel this is probably a good idea.

Seeding down grass on the area they dug up for the well and to run the water pipes

Stenciling the greenhouses with numbers so everyone knows which greenhouse we're talking about when we say Greenhouse 3. And by stenciling the corresponding numbers on the fuel tanks we can track how much it costs to heat each house. The fuel delivery companies can put the greenhouse fuel tank number on the bill instead of getting a fuel bill marked "Greenhouse behind house"; we have none there now.

We're going to install pressure treated planks under some of the gates to discourage the turkeys. I saw at least a dozen on my walk around the farm yesterday. They sneak in under the fence where the gates are. They were sampling melons when I happened upon them. I don't think they're intelligent enough to fly over the fence to get in, not at least a whole flock anyways.

There's a little bit of seeding down to do although I must say Kelly and crew did a tremendous amount of cover crop seeding last week. They seeded around thirty acres in my absence. A few more acres and about everything we have that could be seeded will be seeded.

The next couple of months will have us doing more projects like the ones above, then we'll move on to more fun things; harvesting, pulling plastic, and grinding spent crops. A few more fields to seed and we'll be closer to laying the farm to rest for another year.

Until next week, Brian