The Temperature at which Manure Becomes Compost.

This is not legal advice, please consult your county extension. That’s what they’re there for.

I like compost, soil likes compost, worms like compost. Everyone likes compost. You know what I don’t like? Pathogens. Pathogens and weed seeds that show up in uncomposted manure. At last year’s Tilth Producers conference I attended a workshop [...]

Using a Chicken Tractor as an Inexpensive Greenhouse

So it’s Spring and the chickens are sleeping in the coop and are still in the sacrificial paddock when the fence keeps them in and free-ranging when it doesn’t. I prefer to think of it as a Sacrifice Zone but that’s because I’m a nerd.

The result is that we’ve got a mess of [...]

I appear to have committed us to growing hops

We were recently interviewed for the newsletter of the Trust for Working Landscapes, the land trust that is leasing us some land. The article came out yesterday, and apparently we managed not to say anything too dumb!

“From Stacks to Starts” — A story of Dropstone Farms By Christy Carr

After meeting in [...]

Where have you been??

Sorry, as always, about the radio silence. Stuff has been remarkably busy for it being only January, er, February … oof.

We are in the process of applying for a spot to farm on some public land that’s managed by the Trust for Working Landscapes. That, plus the construction of our greenhouse, plus [...]

Snowpocalypse is hard.

It’s getting brighter. Slowly. And the snow is starting to melt and maybe the hoophouses will uncollapse and the poultry will get to go outside and play. In the meantime, please enjoy the following reminders of summer, when you could wear shorts and dig potatoes out of warm dirt.

Handfuls of potatoes!

The Contents of My Pickup Bed

1 (one) Combination brush hook/zombie pacification device 3 (three) six foot lengths of rebar 5 (five) seed starting trays 1 (one) tow rope 3 (three) 25 kg bags of organic layer mash 1 (one) 50# bag of diatomaceous earth

It seems like an interesting life, doesn’t it? It’s dark now (at four-freakin’-thirty) but I’ll [...]

Newest addition to the farm

Hey new chicken! Let’s have cuddles!, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

This is Mr. Klassy. He is a Polish rooster. He came from our friend in Seattle, who cannot have roosters due to noise. He is not crowing yet, but he is trying …

I am on my way to a Kitsap [...]

Long-overdue farm update(s)

I had some chicken stories to tell, but there really are other things going on in our lives, which isn’t evident from the past few posts, so I will discuss those other things instead. So here is a list of things I meant to write about when they were current, and didn’t.

We [...]

Yep, we’re country now.

UPS confirms it. Delivery from Lowes, in the hay shed.

New pictures, and first garden dinner!

I finally got a new Eye-Fi card, which is a super handy thing in that it lets me skip the exact steps where I always get hung up when taking and uploading photos. Getting them from the card to the computer and then to the internet is hard for me for whatever reason. The [...]

Planting the First!

Did our first planting last weekend. We put in 20′ of peas under the trellis. 10′ of Sugar Snap peas and 10′ of Oregon Trail. We till a yard-and-a-half of Whitney Farms compost and a gallon or so of complete organic fertilizer (a la Steve Solomon) into the soil. It’s been raining and sunny [...]