The tomatoes have finally moved out of the basement and into the great outdoors.  Because it’s still cool at night, I put them on a rolling cart so I could easily move them into the garage for the night.  They’ve stretched some because of the weak light in the basement, but the growth is pretty remarkable.  Remember what they looked like 2 weeks ago?

This is how they looked right after being potted up from the small 3/4″ germination blocks to the 2″ blocks.  They looked pretty spindly!  It’s amazing what more space and soil can do.  They’re probably ready to be moved up to even larger containers.  But that will have to wait for another day.

Here, surrounded by the accouterments of a suburban family, and modeled by our son Chris, is the latest addition to our lineup of farm equipment.  It’s a bin for screening and mixing potting soil.  We go through enormous quantities of the stuff, even at our small scale.  Thinking it would be more convenient to not have to mix our own, we tried using a commercial mix from the local family-owned garden shop.  But it was getting expensive and in fact was less convenient because we were constantly having to go buy more.

This bin was inspired by our farming mentors at Stonebridge Farm, outside of Lyons.  While not made fully from salvaged materials, as theirs is, it’s still homemade and designed just for our needs.  There’s a removeable screen that fits into the top, and the bin is large enough to make 4 bushels at one time.

The process?  Dump the ingredients onto the screen at the top,

sift them through into the bin below,

mix with a garden fork, and put into 20 quart bags.  The bags we then take to our seed-starting room in the basement, where we either fill plastic trays or make soil blocks.

The ingredients?  Compost, rich soil from the garden, peat moss, and new this time, pumice stone.  Sand is an alternative to the pumice, but the water-holding characteristics of the stone seemed intriguing (watering is one of those tasks that seems to get neglected too often), so we decided to experiment.

And it’s off to the seedling races.

We had 15 cubic yards of compost delivered a while back, and now it’s time to spread it.  Not wanting to shell out several thousand dollars for a real compost spreader, we’re putting our $300 utility trailer, a Harbor Freight special, to good use.  Park it, fill it with the front end loader on the Kubota, and pull it down the bed with the rear panel raised just enough to get the right flow of compost out the back.  With two people, it’s easy.  One drives, the other walks along making sure the compost is falling.  With one person, it’s a different process.  Without going into detail, suffice it to say that the tractor’s cruise control comes in real handy…!

Used the rototiller on the Satoh tractor to make 5 beds.  After spreading compost, I tilled the beds.  I then marked the rows with this contraption:

It’s a Valley Oak wheel hoe with an extra custom toolbar containing small wheels on casters.  As it’s pushed down the bed in freshly-tilled soil, it leaves three perfectly parallel tracks that are easy to follow with the Earthway Garden seeder.

Though it’s difficult to see because of the glare from the early morning sun, this pic shows a tray of 3/4″ germination blocks containing tomatoes.  Here they’re being moved “up” to 2″ blocks.  They may look spindly now, but in just a few days, they’ll have grown significantly with the extra room and the new shot of nutrients.