Dirt and a Corn Cob will get you Clean

We made our last batch of soil.  We use a nutritious blend of peat moss, alfalfa meal, rock phos - wait a minute, if we told you our special proprietary blend, we'd have to kill you.  Just kidding, we use brownie mix from Duncan Hines.  This last batch of soil will be used to start our summer squash, melons, and winter squash in.  Baby pumpkin nursery.  I've been sampling the horse sweet feed when no one is watching.

Holy Mackerel Our Feet Hurt

It's official: the trees are greeen!  That unseasonable heat is finally over and we can put away our antiperspirant deodorant for now.  Back to hooded sweatshirts and that Tom's of Maine stuff.  The past few days we have gotten so much accomplished that I feel like I really deserve the cold Sam Adams that sits in my hand.  

Spring planting is the name of the game recently up here on Wooden Hill.  Our brassicas are in and those little guys have irrigation all hooked up so that they can drink Powerade all day and get their electrolytes.  We also now have radishes and more carrots in.  We must not forget to give those carrots vitamin A pills tomorrow.  Hmmmm..... ohh yeah, and we reached a great milestone when we planted all of our onions this morning.  Walla walla sweet spanish onion bing bang.  The fields are changing so rapidly that we even catch the horses staring at us out there.  Don't worry, they'll get some of those carrots.

Other than the planting, we are finding that there's always something to do here on the farm.  Whether it's curry combing the horsees, watering all our little guys, weedwacking, or making sure the greenhouse isn't 102 degrees, we have our hands full and find that no grass is growing under our feet.  Megan the horse nibbled on our lawnmower earlier today.  Oh, and Charlton saw a groundhog this morning and now we're about to eat a "mystery meat" dinner.  There's also now a scarecrow North Face fleece in the fields.

"Spotty doesn't eat the pate"

First Harvest


We thought our first harvest would be right around the start of June, but here we are mid April eating some fresh home grown veggies!  Lettuce seedlings!  Mmm MMM good.  Exactly one (small) bite of heaven.

Life is good...and busy

We have finished our 4th day together as a full farm team and life is good and the farm looks great.  The rain earlier this week didn't stop us from transplanting flowers, tomatoes and lettuce into flats.  The high tunnel is starting to get nice and full.  The brassicas look like triumphant champions while our lettuce is a little flopsy right now, but they're getting tougher everyday.  The horses have been grazing in their newly redesigned pasture and they are definitely enjoying the beautiful weather just like we are. 

Cook Student Organic Farm

Here are some pictures from the farm at Rutgers that Charlton, Marley and I worked on together. The Cook Student Organic Farm has been around since 1993, and has been running a CSA program since then. They started cultivating 1 1/4 acres of crops in 1994 and were growing on 3 by 1996. CSOF started out with 24 shares at $150 per share the first year. The 2007 season had 130 shareholders at $400 per share. We grew on 3 1/2 acres. Though the farm has a professor as a full time advisor, it is the students who take charge of every operation, from seed ordering in winter to cover-crop planting in the fall. Oh, and something really cool happened with I bought a book not too long ago called "Sharing the Harvest - A Guide to Community Supported Agriculture" by Elizabeth Henderson. As I flipped through the pages, I realized that 3 pages were devoted to explaining how a CSA program can work in a university setting - and they chose CSOF as the model! I bought a book to learn about the CSA movement, and it turns out we're in the book! It was then that I realized just how small this movement is. It was first developed in Japan in the mid 1960's and was brought to America in the mid 1980's. Figures say that in 1990, there were 50 CSA projects in America. 600 projects were up and running in 1996 and by now, there are around 2,200. Make that 2,201.

It all started with a barn, some paprikash, and some very real sounding chicken noises

And so it begins!  We have officially started our organic farm!  The season is underway.  Our business plan is in our heads and hearts, if not yet fully on paper.  We picked up our soil ingredients on a really windy day, constructed a shady looking grow room in the front bedroom of the farmhouse, mixed up some soil, seeded some veggies, and we're off!  Onionsscallionsasparagusleekscabbagebroccolifennelsagelavenderrosemarychamomilelemon balmmintspruce...  they all are alive and well and teensy.  Whoa whoa whoa - this is the type of project that speeds up, so I better reflect now - before it's fall, before the corn is gold, and before my unbelievable tan.

So it's hard to say when we got started.  I think it was around a campfire one night.  If you go further back, it might be more appropriate to say Marley got started in her father's garden and Charlton got started when he began hearing birds speak.  They also got started when they ran the largest student-run organic farm in the nation (Cook Student Organic Farm at Rutgers University).  I got started when I bought a carabiner in high school and swore I would be rugged.  No... that's a lie.  I got started when I said to myself, "what on earth are we going to do with our family farm?"  The more I learned about organics, the more it became less about the higher price point, and more about encouraging sustainability, and providing healthy and safe food for a community that one lives in.  Enough about that.

We will start a CSA program (community supported agriculture) in 2010.  This year, we hope to work and enrich the soil,  see what the land is capable of producing, establish a customer base, and get the word out about the best tasting tomatoes you've ever had.  We will run a farm stand on site.  The farm has been in my family since the early 1800's.  Somewhere along the line, the department of transportation bought some of our land and built a highway through the property.  This has always sucked.  The stupid road noise, the dumb trucks - it's always made the farm less idyllic.  Well, now kiddies, we's gonna use that to our advantage, cause what does every farm stand need? - -   TRAFFIC !  We hope to gain some loyal customers and let them know about our CSA plans.  Every customer is a potential shareholder.  We hope to stress local organic food.  We hope to be able to run our CSA directly from the farm.  We want our folks to be as connected to the land as we'll be.  "Hey Mr. Shareholder, you want to show your kid where the carrot he just ate came from?"  "Right this way, sir."

So, back to the plants.  We've got baby plants.  Lots of baby plants.  We water them and give them light.  We hoped to rent a greenhouse, so our veggies could have the best conditions in the earliest stages of their lives.  We failed.  If there is one thing I'm sure of in this world, it's that no one rents greenhouses in central Pennsylvania.  No one.  If you prove me wrong, I will give you our farm.  Yes, give it to you.  Anyway, having no greenhouse to start in, Charlton and Marley, amazingness personified times a million, figured out that we can do it without one, and start our seedlings in a sunny room in the house.  So, we built some tables, and set up a nursery in the front bedroom.  And you know what?  It works!  Our plants are thriving and happy and adorable (see pictures below).  However, we are quickly running out of room!  Where is our lettuce going to go?  And the chard?  Oh, crap.  So we built a greenhouse this past weekend.  It's unheated and amazing.  Charlton and Marley found an article online about how to build an inexpensive hoop-style greenhouse.  They rented a Penske truck, picked up the materials and 4oo bucks/13 hours of labor later, we've got ourselves a greenhouse.  It's unheated and beautiful.  C and M have extensive knowledge of growing food in hoophouses, and actually successfully had a Winter share (with 30 or so shareholders) at the Cook Student Organic Farm in the Winter of 2007-2008.

So we have seedlings, a greenhouse, and much more to come.  It's the type of thing that I keep saying to myself, "Wow, it's really happening."