January 5, 2019 Preparing for Spring

It rains a lot here, but this doesn't mean we get to sit around much. Winter is a time for planning and preparing so we are staying moderately busy preparing the greenhouse for early Spring and late Winter crops, and working the ground to keep the weeds down.

One Winter project is working on our long termed goals of building a vertical u-pick strawberry garden.  A vertical garden would give an advantage to other u-picks because there would be no need for getting up and down from the dirty ground. 

The giant strawberry barrels didn't work.
They were heavy, hard to water,
and the soil temperature got awfully high.

We tried one vertical method using 55 gallon plastic drums a few years ago,  but it didn't seem to work for many reasons. Each planter held about 100 plants, but watering and heat considerations kept flowering artificially low, so there wasn't much fruiting. We'll re-purpose the barrels this year, but the goal remains unmet, so we're trying another idea.

Following on last Summer, where we let the 300 berry plants left over from the barrel failure run wild. Now we have about two thousand plants to put in the ground in March.

A major problem will be sorting the plants into rows because, in all of the moving, we lost track of which plant is what variety. They all will be planted none-the-less and we had prepared conventional planting space for them in the Strawberry area made last Summer. We had tilled the soil and planted a cover crop in the new field, but the new septic drain field was forced to go under the space so it had to be torn up; but before annihilating the ground, I pushed all of the good soil into a long berm to wait out construction and Winter. This soil will get put back into rows and we will plant most of our unsorted strawberries on the ground this year. We should get a fairly good crop starting in early Spring and lasting until nearly Winter this year and hopefully with enough yield to sell a bunch of berries. But our u-pick plans will take a bit more time.

Each planter will hold around 69 plants at first.
We'll allow them to double up and then hold them there.
Each tower might produce as much as 100 pints a season.

The new u-pick plan involves building elevated towers of trough planters, stacked one over another, hung between posts, in long rows. Each row will take about six of these eight foot towers and be spaced apart well enough to get two people to to walk through the rows comfortably. There may be as many as twelve rows in the first two years and the whole affair will be under greenhouse roof year around. In summer the roof will change from plastic to shade cloth to keep thing cool for the people who come to pick berries.

Even unsorted, we will have four to six different varieties of strawberry plants and this will make our picking season run from April through October. Each of the varieties has its own picking season, so not all berries will be available in every season. There are many factors in making a garden grow great stuff and we are only getting started. The strawberry gardens will mostly be planted on flat ground this year if all goes well, but so much more is happening around the Farm.

We fully tilled the greenhouse for late winter planting. The weather in the greenhouse isn't Spring-y, but it is close enough that many types of plants will do well in there. Lettuces, spinach, and some of the hardier stuff, like bulb vegetables, ought to do well. We built a series of planting tables to sprout things on. These long tables will be double covered in plastic with a heater for the coldest days ahead. We used re-purposed wood found on Craig's List in building these tables and it saved nearly one-hundred dollars.

I get a ton of stuff off of Craig's List. This week I was able to grab about 340 retaining wall blocks  (about $1000 worth) for free. They are individualized and will make nice planters and terraces. Craig's List is a big help.

We are just in the middle of finishing the new chicken coop and run. Quite a few of the chickens we bought in the Summer never did take to the old coop, so hopefully this will get everyone to go indoors at night. There are few things sadder than looking at wet chickens in near freezing weather, especially when there is a nice warm coop ten feet away.  The new coop is large and spacious, with nine nesting boxes, an automatic door, and pans for easy floor cleaning. The perches will hold fifty birds comfortably and half again as much before bickering sets in, so we are good for size.

Aside from this we are trying to stay motivated while wet with rain, get the house planning moving once more, and prepare for the coming season.