Heat wave!

February 24, 2018 Weekly Updates

We got a little flash of summer this week with two record-breaking days of temperatures around 80 degrees. As a result, our focus quickly shifted from keeping the hoop house warm to keeping it cool, a problem I wasn’t anticipating in February! Even with the sides rolled up all of the way and the door and window open, temperatures were still getting up near 90, not ideal for the cool-weather spring crops planted inside. Whereas it took the first round of hoop house beds at least a week to germinate, the beds planted right before this mini heat wave were up in a matter of days! As a result, inside...

Ice & Seeds

February 8, 2018 Weekly Updates

You really start to see the advantages of a hoop house when you have an ice storm one day and are putting seeds in the ground the next. While the trees and ground were still covered in a good amount of ice this morning, inside the hoop house I watched the thermometer gradually rise to 74 degrees while I prepped beds! (And that’s compared to only 29 degrees outside at the same time.) By this afternoon, we’ll have five beds planted with spring mix, arugula, baby kale, spinach, and radishes. To offer additional protection, each bed with also be covered with a layer of heavy duty row cover which will...

Flashes of green

January 23, 2018 Weekly Updates

The frigid temperatures that settled in over the past month have finally broken and after that steady stream of lows in the teens and single digits, anything above freezing feels like the Caribbean! So it’s been T-shirt weather the last few days with highs jumping up into the 60s. With our work so dependent on the weather, we know to take advantage of good weather when we have it, so we’ve spent the last few days working hard on getting the hoop house fully completed. Mike installed the cranks for the roll-up sides yesterday. These will allow us to roll up about 4.5 feet of the plastic covering to vent...

Finished!

January 11, 2018 Weekly Updates

Building the hoop house was one of our biggest projects in getting the farm up and running and has been looming over our heads for months now. While we put up most of the structure this past fall, we opted to leave the plastic covering off for as long as we could so we wouldn’t have to worry about any damage or collapse if we had heavy snows in the early winter. But with February and thus our first planting dates coming closer and closer, it was time to put hoop house construction back on the front burner. Our original plan was the pull the plastic cover over the structure...

Happy Solstice!

December 21, 2017 Weekly Updates

It’s the winter solstice today, with the longest shadows and the shortest day of the year. And although it’s only December, to me the solstice always means the beginning of the end of winter. Even though the weather is going to stay cold for much, much longer, today is the shortest and darkest that the days are going to get. It’s only getting sunnier from here on out, which means the growing season will be upon us before we know it! As the new year gets closer, we’re getting excited for the season ahead. 2018 will be our first season as an operating farm, which comes with a certain amount...

Getting the fence up

December 12, 2017 Weekly Updates

It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter with snow over the weekend and temperatures not topping freezing tomorrow. I’m thinking fondly of those unseasonably lovely days just after Thanksgiving with highs in the 60s! With the end of the year just around the corner, we’re at last starting to see an end in sight for all of the work we planned for the fall. We are on the last stage of the deer fence installation- putting the actual fencing in- and like almost everything else we’ve tackled over the last few months, it is more time-consuming than expected. Watching the how-to videos, it looked like a simple process of...

Red Hawk Rise Organics

November 30, 2017 Weekly Updates

Along with plugging away at the work outside, we’ve also been focusing on another essential part of the farm- business formation. Of course, when I dreamed about starting my own farm, I was thinking about growing food, not about tax forms, licensing, and permits, but as any small business owner knows, these are crucial steps to running your own operation. And at last, we’re getting there! This week marked a number of milestones in this area. We have been registered as a limited liability company with the state of West Virginia and are now officially known as Red Hawk Rise Organics, LLC. We have a completed operating agreement (a key...

Progress Report!: November Photo Shoot

November 16, 2017 Monthly Photo Shoots, Weekly Updates

With the cold weather settling in and the days growing shorter and shorter, it isn’t hard to be up with the sun. And as this is the first house we’ve lived in with an east-facing view, we’re learning to appreciate sunrises as much as we already appreciate sunsets! With November somehow already halfway over, now seems like a good time to look back over our photos from the last four months and see how far we’ve come. Enjoy! ...

Rocks

November 2, 2017 Weekly Updates

Even as the weather gets chillier, the work hasn’t slowed down. And each job finished seems to create a new job after it, whether we were expecting it or not. The most intense so far has been all about the rocks. Unless you’re farming in the great plains (and for all I know, even there), your soil is likely to have some stones. However, this is less likely in land that has been farmed for years and years as some other poor sucker has probably already pulled them out by one means or another. After talking to our neighbors who have lived here their entire lives, it seems like our...

Raising beds

October 18, 2017 Weekly Updates

What a difference a few days make! On Monday, our field was basically a big dirt pile. Now, it is mostly the precise raised breads you can see in the picture above. The benefit of raised beds (and the reason we chose to work with them) is that the soil warms sooner and dries faster, enabling earlier planting in the spring and helping keep the drainage as good as possible in our somewhat clay soil. After the initial plowing, this was the next big jobs for our BCS walk-behind tractor. Using the rotary plow attachment, Mike and the BCS were able to accomplish in just three days what would have...

Two Feet in the Dirt

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