Creekside Farm stopped trying to sell produce last Summer and stopped selling eggs a bit earlier in the year because investment increases didn't produce sales increases. But we are still planting in the Spring and spent quite a bit of time building a new greenhouse and garden space last year to get restarted in a smaller format. What we are planning is to use the growing plan we had, scaled down to the crops we can make the best use of ourselves. So, many of the same plants, in ones and twos will be planted instead of the fifties and hundreds we did a while ago. We also rebuilt our flock this past Summer, twelve instead of forty, and so our free ranging girls are giving us about a Dozen eggs a day.
The new greenhouse is about ready for the planting months between March and May. Nothing really grows in our cold dirt until June so our plants will live confortable lives in the new Greenhouse until we can get them into the ground in late May. We will be tilling again this year. No-till gardening works well for making good soil fertility but our soil condition is a bit wild right now. Lots of grass out there.Our soils are every bit as good for composition as they were two years ago and we have perhaps sixty yards of compost for use to get things going. We'll till a bunch of our leaf mold and mature compost into our rows sometime on April and the soils will be very ready in late May. This year we'll take more steps to put down weed blocking between rows to keep the weeding workload down a bit. We've plenty to do.
My dream plan is to put in a wooden porch floor this Summer if time and money permit it. We had always envisioned a concrete floor under our wrap around porch roof but the little bit of concrete work we did wasn't really good enough to want a lot more of it. Paying for concrete workers was always out of reach and dry mix concrete is much more expensive now, so we're looking at a wooden porch floor. Wood is quicker and far easier to work with. Until Summer comes we are keeping busy on Winter house projects and it looks like we'll be working in the kitchen this month. This afternoon we found the tile for putting in a backspash over all the counter spaces. We might get to painting in the Kitchen this month, but things here seem to follow their own schedule, and always have. There's always more to do and too little time or money to do them. We only have a few weeks to get things done.
From February through April we will be very busy with a litter of puppies. Pricilla Pixie Stix is having her first litter and is doing very well. We spend a lot of time with our girls, trying to make them comfortable and their pregnancy as easy as we can, but it is still quite a big thing for a dog with such short legs. Lucy had three pups in her first litter and it was fairly easy on her, but most of the time a litter is around eight pups and can go higher. It's a lot of work for everyone and there's only so much you can do to make things easier.
I have always used New Year's Resolutions. Last year I resolved to lose thirty of the pounds I had packed on being depressed. I achieved the goal in August and then went back to eating normally for a few months. This year the goal is another thirty pounds. Weight loss isn't a difficult formula, it's simply not eating when you aren't hungry and eating less when you are. Lots of rice cakes, fewer cookies, hungry all the time, that's the plan.
Life goes on at Creekside Farm. If anyone needs a garden space to grow food this year, or eggs, give us a call and we'll get you growing.
No comments:
Post a Comment