A long, eventful, productive week. We completed our first major planting! The field rows are 250 feet long; i'm told we planted about sixteen THOUSAND plants last monday. Here's what we planted:
From starts - lots of lettuce (many different varieties), kale, broccoli, fennel, mustard greens, radicchio.
From seed - salad dandelion, carrots, beets, spinach.
There might be others i'm forgetting. But it was a lot of plants! A lot of food. Then we set up the irrigation pipes (stored at the end of the fields when not in use) and "watered in" all the new plants and seeds. The ravens/crows were circling, by the end of it all. We also amended the field with gypsum and feather meal before planting. And there was a treatment of some of the rows with Ecotrol - a product of corn grit, soaked in essential oils, to ward off Symphylans. Our fearless, amazing farm manager(s) have put together a map of where the Symphylans lived in the field last year, so we only had to treat several rows with that. It was especially nice to plant in those rows, because you're sticking plants in and there's this nice, pleasing unexpected aroma wafting up from the ground.
Now, my camera is out of batteries so i'm putting the photos on hold, but i'll keep the news coming. We also did our first sowing of seeds this past week - learning about potting mix, different seed types and where all those things need to come from in order for the farm to be Organic (certified). Interesting note: we rebuilt our potting shed siding because originally it was constructed with treated plywood - since the potting mix spends time right up against that wood siding, it had to be replaced for the farm to meet the Organic certification.
David Brian and i went to Slide Ranch on Saturday, for their annual "Spring Fling" open-farm fundraiser. It was wicked fun. They are an educational farm, located just to the north of us on Highway 1. I spent the morning making origami with kids (yay!) and then ate some serious donated scones and had a potato sack race, egg race (i lost, broke my egg), and three legged race. Also, there were sheep and goats and chickens and ducklings! And baby goats! The kid goats were really a highlight. They are completely amazingly cute, and they are very friendly - they come right over to you and then try to eat your finger/jacket/watch. Blissful sigh. The ranch is a cliff-away from the water, so we also walked down to the tidepools and i also blissed out with some marine invertebrate geeking out. We saw mussels, barnacles, crabs (3 types including hermits), gastropods snails, giant green anemones, ochre sea stars, and other sea stars. Then we walked back to GGF along the coast - a perfectly beautiful walk, and much closer than i thought it would be (about 1.5 hr).
From here on out, the plan is to plant every other week, and sow on the off weeks. We're getting back on schedule, after we were rained out at first.
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