Farmers Market Today!

RAdish 

Healthy soil in the herb garden with mushrooms growing up in the mint.

Newer lettuce planting doing very well. Just need to be thinned this weekend.

New pasture for the hens. We are getting a hundred or so day old chicks next month.  

Everything's Coming In Now..

We are getting ready to head up to Colorado for a week. Lots of projects have been getting done around the farm in preparation. We have built new pastures for the chickens, planted brussels sprouts, lettuce, chard and carrots in a newly built low tunnel, and made many small adjustments to the irrigation system. With a couple of good storms we got some cooler weather which made all of our work easier. 

The purple pole beans are covered in flowers

Tiny pole bean

Cucumbers growing up the opposite side of the pole bean trellis

Tiny pickling cucumber.

Cucumber flower

Lettuce just after harvesting for market. This salad greens mix is growing under
the pole bean/cucumber trellis.  The tunnel that the vines from the bean and cucumber
plants form make it easy to create a microclimate suitable for the lettuce this time of year.

Yellow Taxi tomatoes

Sprouted Grains as Poultry Feed

Wheat berries after 2 days sprouting.

Soaking on day 1

Farming in the Rocky Mountains

Tomatoes getting their first true leaves.

Blue Flax Flower

Hot Peppers: Habanero, Jalapeño, Cayenne

Hoop-Houses for Growing Food Year-Round

Beets, Lettuces and Broccoli

1/4 in. drip in place ready for a pump to deliver water we caught from the sky.

All the broccoli is doing pretty well, including transplants from thinning.

Planting Native Fruit Trees

Chokecherry trees from NM State Forestry 

Some of the Chokecherries had incredible root systems. These two are going to get planted in the ground somewhere, probably trade for smaller trees of different species.

Plums

Spring in the Mountains

Garlic bed closest to cistern, with plum and currant and chokecherry trees

Another shot of that same garlic

Currant

Happy hens come running

Thank You Rain

we got a nice, steady inch and a half of rain in the last 24 hours.

a full day.

this was all today (the "day off") after we went to the DMV twice, got a new SS card and finally new drivers lincences .. also Becke got a new cell phone for the first time in like five years.

living-room/ green-house is emptying out as we plant more and more seedlings..

tomatoes planted, onions and basil.

greenhouse emptied out.. down to just the wide short table. then we can use the taller eight foot one for vending at market next week.

planning on cutting irises to sell at market also. we have nice white and purple ones. sage and mint are also possible first harvests. radishes are in a slow but close second.

busy, busy bees.

just an expression...no hives yet (thank god, couldn't even imagine that on top of everything else we've decided to do this season) picked up our friend at the train station in Lamy last week and got some good pics:

snow day in April!

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This blog is going multi-media. I fed the pig some kitchen scraps this afternoon and brought along the video camera. I am told she will be ready for slaughter ever sooner that originally thought. Good stuff.

harvesting snow melt

cilantro and flat leaf parsley

progress

had to put a name on the papers so we decided on Spotty Dog Farm. what do you think? we heard a lot of suggestions and this one was the best. By Saturday we will have turned in the complete application (15 pages ) and paid all dues and then stuff just needs to grow! kinda exciting and frightening all at the same time. we just kinda comfortably fell into this. just let it ride.

some seeds started...

two trays of green chiles and one of the longer type tomato and three rows of our own sweet pepper seed

....onions, tomatoes (only the romans) still two other varieties, and "cross your fingers" peppers

snowbrew

nice snowy day off, why not have a homebrew?!?



got ingredients for a true american style imperial IPA...should be delicious and taking a reading of the dark ale today..that will be delicious.

seeds!

below is the seed order we just placed with Botanical Interests, it should be all we need, and we are already talking about putting more 1/2" line on the other side of the house for mainly "three sisters" (corn, beans and squash) and of all the seed i planted last week (tues. i think) the pinto beans are already up and we are expecting corn any day. this is a trial to see what germinates and how quickly. but only the stuff we saved, or bought from farmers. we also have ten or so pounds of extra planting garlic that was supposed to be for eating but sprouted and some was moldy, so i transferred it into a mesh-cloth bag in the shed.

all technology on the fritz, but homebrew seems fine

just to explain the title here...the camera now works only when it feels like it, and the vcr is just spitting out any tape you put into it..i'm sure there are other things not working around here, these are just the most recent.

starting from seed

Below is the mother plant of the Chinook brewing hops. They were doing very well inside our mock-greenhouse. They were well settled until they went outside and got destroyed by strong winds coming over the mountain. But I remain optimistic, as there is a lot of new, good green growth that is wrapped itself around the twine up the house. Also the small clone had been outside a day or two and is looking really good. They really just need to get established the first year to survive their first winter, then I will harvest more hops every year after that.



Below is a photo of our tray of basil. (sweet basil i think it was) We have seen slow development with the basil and all the herbs in general. The sage is doing the best out of everything, although the basil has some really dark green new growth.