Farm Friday

This week was a productive one here at the farm, with enough dry weather to get our work done and enough rain to help our seeds to germinate. Everything has been planted now, so we're (very optimistically) looking forward to some summer lettuce, corn, green beans, tomatoes, winter squash, melons, summer squash, cucumbers, peppers, okra, eggplant, popcorn, and black-eyed peas.

My second round of broiler chicks arrived this morning and have settled happily into the brooder.

They can be quite the gluttons 8)

I thought I would add a little education to this post, so I won't be offended if you fall asleep. A large part of the difficulty in creating new pasture is a natural process called ecological succession. Simply put, when land is abandoned, it reverts to it's natural state. Where we live, the land tries to revert to forest; all of this area was solid forest at one time. Thus, in order to create pasture we must move succession backwards, which is always time consuming. Our pasture was planted to crops at one time, then around 30 years ago it was in pasture. It was then abandoned and followed the normal succession for this area: grass>leafy weeds>woody brush>trees. All of these stages can be seen on our land, and even where we have grass there are still some weeds- but the sheep will take care of those.

Grass (a very nice patch, of course:)

Leafy Weeds

Woody Brush

The picture below is a good example of what our farm is like right now. You can see that the woody brush begins as soon as our garden ends; we are still very much in a pioneer stage of taming the land and making it useful. We plan on expanding the garden into that brushy area, which was part of the woods last fall.

I also wanted to mention a documentary (which we have been looking forward to for quite some time) called Food, Inc. The movie includes interviews and commentaries with real-food heroes like Joel Salatin, Michael Pollan, and Eric Schlosser, and sets out to reveal the truth about our industrial food system. I look forward to seeing how widespread a reception it gets, as it brings a message which needs to be spread. It has now been released, unfortunately only in a few large cities. Tell everyone whom you know that eats!

Have a great weekend,

Sherlock