Dropstone Farms

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 card, though, is camera storage card and ALSO a wireless card, so when it’s on its home network, it sends them automatically to my computer and to Flickr! Which is incredibly convenient. So, I hope to have more pictures available more quickly, in the future.

I’ll not put too many here, but you can click over to my Flickr to see everything that’s new; don’t forget to click to the next page (or two; I took a lot of pictures). Or you can scroll down to the bottom of the “Little farm — getting started” photoset.

We harvested our first meal ingredient from the garden. Swiss chard risotto for dinner!

The little broccoli starts we bought at the market about five weeks ago are starting to make little broccoli sprouts.

We made a hoophouse of PVC and clear plastic, and the tomatoes, peppers, and basils are happily growing in their little warm house. I hope this will help ensure we have a better tomato harvest that last year — it rained all summer, yeah, but still, we only got like four tomatoes, and we would have done a lot better with some sort of home for them.

This is most of the garden, looking South. Directly in front is the cabbage-like-things section, with some cabbages and some brussels sprouts and also some cauliflower and broccoli. On the trellis is 2 kinds of beans and 2 kinds of peas, with greens (lettuce, arugula, mustard greens, kale, chard) planted in between so they will be shaded and not bolt. Potatoes are to the right of the trellis. The hoophouses have the hot plants (tomatoes, peppers, basil). Not pictured: carrots; beets; squashes; onions; corn; more beans; fava beans; cucumbers; watermelons.

The only reason Little Red stayed up there long enough to let me take pictures is that she doesn’t realize she can fly down. She was very skeptical of being up so high.

Chores this weekend include figuring out how to keep bamboo from spreading, so we can plant some to use for trellises, hoophouses, etc. next year, and thinking about building chicken tractor(s) and a solar food dryer. AND blogging more. I have a book review to write!

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It was 70° here on Saturday, which is approximately late June weather, rarely in mid-April. It was also the first day of the Bainbridge Island Farmers’ Market, so we rode our bikes into town in the morning and did some shopping. I had my bike all tricked out with my removable wicker basket on the front, and my new REI-dividend-purchased pannier on the back. We strolled around for an hour or so, had lunch at the pub, and returned home with my front basket full of seedlings, pannier full of groceries from the regular store, and Garth’s messenger bag and front basket full of veggies and eggs from the farmers.

When we got home, we immediately took advantage of the heat — seriously, it was actually hot — to bring all manner of poultry outside. Chickens were in the electric fence, until we discovered they could get through the holes of the fence regardless of zapping, so we moved them to a smaller, but still large, area with a smaller-holed. It was pointless, really, as they huddled together in one section for an hour or two, although it was definitely above 70° at that point.

Our charming young next-door neighbor Calvin, who is almost four, inquired with volume and frequency as to the location of the very cute ducklings. So we brought them out to enjoy the sun too, though Calvin was napping by the time we wrangled them outside. Turns out ducklings like a dog-dish full of water and bits of weeds and grass nearly as much as a four-year-old likes ducklings.

The chickens spent their first night in the coop on Saturday, but we didn’t get much else done. Saturday was poultry day, I guess.

And Sunday was planting day. We had bought broccoli, chard, and onion seedlings at the market, and we picked out three kale seedlings from our seed tray. Chard (multicolored) and kale (1 Winterbor and 2 Nero di Toscani, I think) went in between the two rows of peas (Oregon Trail and some Sugar Snap, both of which have germinated almost 100%, which is awesome). The greens should keep sort of shady there, and not bolt too quickly, I think.

Broccoli went sort of alongside the rosemary bush, which we had to trim to get the deer fence in place. I don’t remember which variety it is — the broccoli, that is — but I remember it was from Persephone Farms, so I’ll ask them when we go again this weekend.

The onions are Egyptian walking onions, which are funny looking and awesome. Instead of making a bulb underground and a flower on top, they make a group of small bulblets on top. If you don’t harvest them, the weight gets too much and the stalk bends down to the ground, where the bulblets plant themselves and grow. Hence, walking. The 4-H kid we got them from at the market said they make good scallions, too.

Earlier this week, Garth planted potatoes, too. Rather than marking them with the little flags, he drew a map in his notebook. He says it’s “four plants of everything, and six of All Blues.” I don’t know what “everything” means, but I’ll find out eventually, I’m sure.

As always, pictures are up at Flickr: Chickens; Ducks; Little farm (not very up-to-date).

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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 off and on so our lack of irrigation system hasn’t been a problem. We’ll need to get on that sooner rather than later.

It’s been a week and nothing has popped out of the ground yet. We’ve got a week for germination to take place so I’m not worried yet.

On the upside, chicks are three weeks old as of last Friday. They are no longer little fuzz balls and are starting to look like actual chickens. Gangly, half-feathered, awkward teenaged chickens, but chickens nonetheless. Lauren also started 102 plants in our greenhouse mudroom. She gets to blog that one though.

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