The munchkin crew was out on a beautiful Easter Sunday for a little paleontology and some onion planting.

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Today we planted our first seeds outside. Scott and I spent the morning forming the first of our 50 beds. It started with some tinkering to get the rototiller going. Thanks to Scott’s know-how, it didn’t take too long and then we were off and running! Well, I was running while Scott walked the tiller out to the garden. Actually, it was slower then a walk; more like a saunter. A very relaxed saunter. The old Craftsman don’t go so fast.

After telling him I’d see him when he got there tomorrow, I headed on out to plan the morning’s activities. Scott got tiller duties, and the evil side of me was glad. Turns out the field is quite a haven for rocks. The kind that hide until you pass over them with a rototiller, when they jump up and wreak all kinds of havoc. This morning, the particular havoc we had to deal with was broken pins on the tine shaft. Not once, but three, four, even five times! But, once again thanks to Scott’s ingenuity, it got fixed every time and he managed to complete a third of the whole field. Way to go, Scott!

While he manhandled the rototiller, I used the SunHorse to make the raised beds. That thing may be solar powered, but it still takes quite a bit of muscle to make it work. Unfortunately, it’s muscle I’m finding is sorely lacking on this poor farmer-wannabe.

But, we got a few beds made, and then managed to plant several rows of onion sets, some lettuce, and some spinach. The plan was to get some seeding done before the snow falls tomorrow. A nice blanket of snow will be great for getting these seeds to germinate. So after a beautiful sunny day in the field, here’s hoping we get a snow storm!

The first plantings are in! We started onions tonight (a couple of weeks later than we planned to), with some broccoli, cabbage, and lettuces soon to follow. Seedlings are typically started in plastic trays, but we wanted to try using a less plastic-intensive approach. Read the rest of this entry »

We finally started preparing the ground this weekend! Today’s beautiful weather offered an opportunity to spread compost on the field in advance of the plowing that we’ll hopefully do sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Our relationship with Lone Hawk Farm affords us a great advantage when it comes to the fertility of our garden soil. Lone Hawk has a stable of several horses that eat organic hay that’s produced right there on the farm. The horses’ manure and bedding is composted and then used to ammend and fertilize the garden. It’s a great, sustainable system: the farm’s hay production is used to nurture the horses, whose waste is put to good use nurturing the garden produce, which is put to good use nurturing us!

My friend Scott, who will be helping out this year, and I spread close to a couple of tons of manure on the field. It took a while, and was pretty hard, dirty work (the strong winds didn’t help much , but we got it done in a few hours. So now there’s a nice layer of rich, crumbly compost just waiting to be plowed in.

The next step will be to plow and then start forming the beds. We’ll start the first seedings of onions this week inside under lights, and they’ll hopefully be planted outside in late April. We’re targeting the middle of May or so for the first veggies. So it won’t be too long now!