This is the first farm that I have set up from scratch, so we’ve had to make decisions about things that on previous farms had already been established. If you are getting ready to set up your own garden in anticipation of the coming growing season, here are two bits of advice from what I’ve learned: First, think carefully about how wide you want your beds to be. I have almost always worked on farms where the beds are 4 feet wide. However, in doing some reading in advance of setting up our farm, I was convinced to try 2.5-foot-wide beds instead and, let me tell you, what an amazing...
Seeing Spring
It’s been lovely watching spring begin to cautiously peak its head around the corner. With the recent warmer temperatures, our garlic has popped above its layer of straw mulch and the hay field next door has turned from a determined winter brown to a startling green. As more and more hints appear that winter’s end is not too far off, our preparatory work is drawing to an end and the real growing season is more and more upon us. We do, of course, still have a few tasks to complete that fit more into the “farm set up” category. One of the big projects that had been looming over us...
Heat wave!
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
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
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!
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!
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
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
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
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! ...