I know I’ve been quiet on the blog so far this year, but that’s just because I’ve been wrapped up in a bunch of theatre productions, publishing another novel, and writing a couple plays and musicals. And planning for the 2013 farm season at Pen and Pepper.
In our basement, we’ve got a big box of seeds all ready to plant at our plot at the New Entry Smith Farm. We’ll be in the same site as last year, plus we’ll have an additional quarter acre, doubling our land to half an acre.
A few weeks ago, Noah and I went to the NOFA bulk order pickup at Waltham Fields, to load 32 50-pound bags of fertilizer and soil amendments into our Subaru (we took it in two trips, because we like our car and intend to use it for a while).
Right now the fields are pretty saturated with water, from all the heavy snow we had a the end of the winter. I’m not sure our garlic will make it (and we have about 1,000 cloves planted) very well, if we don’t get a little dry weather.
New Entry has done a lot of work on the property over the winter, clearing out a lot of trees to make room for a cooler (very excited about this!) and a future barn for the tractors and equipment. We’ll end up with much better sun on our original plot, which will help growth of a lot of our crops.
Last weekend, I was the other New Entry site, helping dismantle an old hoophouse that had a lot of problems. The plan is to rebuild it, in a slightly better site, and without some of the problems that it has right now. It was a great chance to learn how a hoophouse should be built, and to get to know the new farmers who will be joining us at the New Entry sites this summer.
We will be selling our produce to the World PEAS CSA again (now is the time to sign up for a share!), at the JP Farmer’s Market on Thursday afternoons (starting at the end of June), and we’re also doing a sort of mini-informal CSA of our own with 7 neighbors (more on this later). We very much looking forward to warmer weather and getting things growing.