Sunday, May 2, 2010

Spring Continues 2010

Spring rains have finally come and so far, so good, meaning our basement has been dry.  This is no small accomplishment and gives us some cautious confidence that we can start moving out to the farm with some reasonable hope that a lot of our "stuff" to be temporarily stored in the basement will stay dry until we unpack what isn't essential for day-to-day operations.

Here are a few photo updates!

(Photo: Garlic field with our growing pile of boulders in the background. We have found several large piles of field stones on our land, too, which we are hoping to use to make a "stone-look" foundation for our barn and maybe even some stone posts at the entry to our driveway.)

(Photo: Kaya helping to pick paint colors for the front door - finally! - and keeping "guard" to let me know if she sees or hears anything important.)

(Photo: The driveway extension and barn site prepped and ready for the next step. Those big white things are not beehives in the background, but instead are large rain barrels to collect water from the barn roof for a future trickle irrigation system.)

(Photo: Dick using the new gadget to excavate the buckthorn and other invasive species that are too small to use the tractor to pull out and too big for me to dig out. Both "Mr. Shrub-buster" and this gadget are wonders! I just noticed that you can see our new circle drive in the background, done by the same guys who did the barn site prep.)

(Photo: Zingerman's Deli where we sold most of our first crop of green garlic last week. A personal chef in Ann Arbor, MI has bought the rest of our  green garlic crop. Next fall we'll plant much more that can be harvested in the spring. Note - the only reason there is not a line out the door at Zingerman's, which there always is on a typical Saturday morning, is that I took this picture yesterday morning during the University of Michigan's graduation ceremony with special guest President Barak Obama.)

(Photo: My new green garden boots, bought at The Tractor Supply Co., our new favorite store. If they don't hold up, I'll spring for more expensive boots in the future, but these were too cute and inexpensive to pass up!)

(Photo: Full moon rising over our garlic field last week - I'm going to post this photo at the top of my blog for a few weeks, but wanted to have it here, too.)

"Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row"

Diana Dyer, MS, RD

2 comments:

Ali said...

things are looking great at the farm, and i love your new green boots! i remember pulling buckthorn for the Natural Area Preservation group in A2, it was "thorny" to say the least!

Kateri said...

I'm impressed at how much you are getting done so quickly. Great that you've already started selling your garlic. Do the restaurants have specific recipes for the garlic greens? I pick some early as needed, but never thought of them as a delicacy or something to be sought after. (New garlic bulbs are a totally different story, like new potatoes, older garlic just doesn't compare at at all!)