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!