april showers

We spent the first half of the day in the office rearranging where beds of vegetables would go... occasionally jogging out into the rain to ponder the circumstances of each field. Things are looking greener out there! The cover crops (mostly winter rye) are waking up! We got the whole plan done, that is, what is planted where. Then we grouped the planting dates into several-week chunks, to figure out when we want to go out on the tractor to work up the soil. Dave says we need 3 or 4 weeks time between working up a good cover crop and planting. If it's bare ground, you can get away with 1 or 2 weeks. We need to start out there next week! Hopefully the rain will let up... not much sun in the forecast.

We decided that in order to fallow some ground, we need to open up another field. Dave has already cleared the land but we need to build the fence around it & plow up the sod. It's going to be more work, but Nick & I are psyched to do it, to see how to start a field from the beginning.

The second half of the day Nick & I drove to Poughkeepsie to pick up wood shavings for the chickens, make a larger copy of the farm map I traced, and drop off parsnips & celery root at the food bank. Poughkeepsie's a pretty depressing town, and in the rain it was at it's finest (saddest). I thought that the food bank would be kind of wary of recieving these strange, dirt-covered roots that have been sitting around for a while on the farm, but they were actually really excited that we were from a farm, and an organic farm! And they kept saying how good the vegetables smelled... looking on their shelves, I could guess they don't get much fresh stuff, at least not that time of the year.

I went out to a contra dance tonight. Met some other farmers, and some old friends. Really fun stuff, good fiddle playin'. Talked a little about sheep, goats. I'm considering getting a few to run on the pasture/lawn/cover crop around the farm. Need to do lots more research & talk to people. Tomorrow I visit another farm.

No tomato seedlings up yet.