plowing 101

Every morning we take down this plastic divider in the greenhouse that keeps the heat in only one side. Every night we put it back up. We can change it's location so that the space becomes larger or smaller depending on how many tables we have filled with plants. It's the small things you can do every day to save energy.

In the morning we planted trays of flowers in the greenhouse.

I planted 2 more rows of peas with the Planet Jr. This is what the rows look like after rolling through with the seeder:
The peas we planted last time are germinating! Not out of the soil yet though...


We turned on the irrigation well & checked/flushed out all the valves. Dave has them spaced out at the beginning of each field, covered in these boxes, which sometimes fill with dirt or get run over by a tractor. So we repositioned some of them, adding rocks in the bottom & outsides.

Then we took all the long PVC pipes with sprinkler-heads out of the rafters of the barn & set up a few in the pea field. Dave showed us how he puts them together. And we turned on the water! We have water! Now we can put in all those plants ready in the greenhouse to transplant & be able to water them in. Rain is not on the forecast for a week, and it will be almost 80 degrees today.

And we plowed. We tore up Field Z of it's rye/vetch cover... a plow basically just flips the top part (5" or so) over. Then we leave it for a few weeks to decompose under there... with the compost that I spread. After that, we will disc it & rototill it & prepare it for potatoes!




I went to a really cool concert in someone's beautiful home: the band was Vasen, they are a folk instrumental group from Sweden, playing the 12-string guitar, viola, and the Nickelharpa, an old (700 yrs!) Swedish instrument with 15 strings & buttons you push instead of frets. They were AMAZING. Check them out: http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~brash/vasen.html