We finally got to set the early plants out this weekend. Yeah! During the week, Jeff laid 4 rows of plastic, and this morning we started bright and early planting cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower plants :
We also got onion plants, which Jens had ordered for us, but we just ran out of time and only got about 50 planted so far.
Looks like our start-up seeds are thriving…actually thinking that we need to re-pot some of them into larger containers soon. The frost date is still over a month away after all, and we want these plants to be strong and sturdy.
 |
| Tomatoes and Marigolds |
 |
| Peppermint |
It got warmer – even 41°F seemed balmy enough to work in the vineyard all morning. We nearly finished the Chambourcin patch #1 with basic pruning and if it would not have been for the gusty wind, we would have gotten even further. Instead we started pruning the upper blackberry patch, which we never finished last fall – this is our newer, not yet bearing, patch of Triple Crown berries. Hopefully, we can get ahead of the weeds by starting early. Unfortunately, half of this patch was still snow covered and the ground was frozen so hard, that we could not get all the weeds out – so the pruning was limited to certain sections of the patch.
And – we started our first seeds: Bell Pepper, one seed packet of a mixed variety (that did really well last year), and a second packet of just red roasting peppers. Probably should have started these a week or two ago, so I am hopeful that they will get strong enough by mid May to plant outside. Also started some Marigolds, just for fun! It is so nice to see flats of seeds on the windowsills.
Garden:
Our garden is definitely finished for this season – the last vegetables to harvest this year were load of peppers (of all things). They did really well and we managed to get 3 large bowls of peppers right before the first frost.
Berries:
Jeff completely finished pruning, weeding and mowing the large blackberry patch. He also tied up all the remaining primocanes to protect them from being blown around by winter winds. Tina finished weeding all the blueberries, and we even found time to tie up our sparse raspberry patch.
Not too much for us to do at the farm, except for finishing one last mowing But when we visited Zach and Rachel in Ohio last week, Tina and Toben had a blast raking up all their maple leaves.
Apples:
We are NOT yet finished with processing apples, as a matter of fact we just bought another “bin”, which is roughly 20 or so bushel. We’ve been making and canning apple sauce and will be pressing more cider this coming weekend.
Sometimes we are just lucky when it comes to auctions: Caleb, Sam and Tina went to a farm auction today, which turned out to be mostly vegetable growing equipment and supplies. The best buy was probably a plastic layer, which Caleb successfully bid on. Tina and Sam got huge stack of tomato cages, as well as stakes, flats, flower pots and industrial sized bags of potting soil. Plus it was a really pleasant fall day, which already got us thinking about garden plans for next year!
