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It’s been a very busy week here at Summit Springs Farm, and I wanted to take a bit of time here this morning (Sonya is out spading, and I’m on Lydia duty) to try and tell everyone what we’ve been up to.  First, Sonya has been spending a lot of time on the tractor, spading and respading both fields, making beds, etc.  Our field planting is really underway now.  I added another bed of sugar snap peas to the three I planted last week, plus half a bed of our salad mix:  arugula, kale, mizuna, tatsoi, etc.  We’ve also started transplanting little plants from the greenhouse into the field, including beets, broccoli, Napa cabbage, lettuce, Lacinato and red Russian kale, and kohlrabi.  It’s starting to look like a farm around here!

I also spent a day putting up our 3-rope electric deer fence around Field 2, the bigger of our fields out past the greenhouse.  We use fencing and general equipment purchased from Wellscroft Farm in Chesham, New Hampshire, and we were very pleased with the results last year.  Our fences are pretty simple and not very high; a deer could easily leap right over.  The key is to get the fence up early, before any crops are in the field, and to bait it early and often.  I use peanut butter!  I wrap strips of aluminum foil around the fence rope and make a little packet at the end filled with peanut butter.  The idea is to lure the deer in, let their curiosity get the best of them, touch their little noses or tongues to the foil, and ZAP!  Hopefully, a lesson learned!

Thanks to our friend, Wes Covey, for coming over yesterday afternoon to help out for a few hours.  He helped Sonya do some general farm clean-up and then helped me put row cover on a couple of beds in Field 2 and start the process of erecting the deer fence around Field 1.  Thanks, too, to Sonya’s mom and our next door neighbor, Litha Thurlow, for hanging out with Lydia for a couple of mornings this week so her folks could get some planting done.

Finally, belated thanks to everyone who participated in our potluck last week!  We had a small but spirited group, including my sister and her family who were visiting us from New Hampshire.  Our next potluck will be on the evening of Saturday, May 23rd, so mark your calendars!

The photo above is of our chicken coop which I moved out of the greenhouse today and into the yard with the help of our friend, Hank Mosher (the grinning fella in the photo).  Our place is so muddy right now that we had to use old boards to create a rail system of sorts to get the coop out and over the slop to higher ground.  Many thanks to Hank; this job would have been a real pain to do alone!  He also worked to dig some simple drainage ditches for us around the greenhouse in an effort to speed the runoff.

Hello, all!  I figured it was about time to post a farm update here and at the same time, try to master this blogging business!  Going forward, we’d like to post farm updates and announcements here and try to cut down on the mass e-mails.  Also, once the season proper gets going, we’ll be posting a sort of “e-newsletter” each week with farm notes, announcements, a list of what our CSA members received in their shares, links to recipes, and more.

To state the obvious, spring is here and so is the mud!  Our land holds water very well, so the yard, fields, and even the inside of the greenhouse are all pretty mucky.  We hope that things will gradually dry out in the next couple of weeks so we can get the tractor out in the fields to begin the process of getting ready for planting.

In the meantime, Sonya’s been keeping very busy in the greenhouse, sowing seeds like crazy.  We’re thrilled with how things are progressing out there.  It’s a nice change from last season when, at this point, our greenhouse still wasn’t even finished!  We’re also very happy to have proper greenhouse tables in place, purchased this spring from Rounds Farm down in Hollis.  Last year, we simply used pallets on the ground for our trays.  Proper tables up on concrete blocks, however, allow for much better airflow, drainage, and heating.  Our little seedlings look very happy!

As for me, I’ve been trying to cut wood.  I took down some trees last fall along the double rock wall that runs through our hay fields and took a few more down last week.  Also, I cut down an old apple tree and two old pear trees in the yard that were hollow, half dead, and simply too far gone to try and salvage.  We plan to visit the annual Fedco tree sale in a couple of weeks and may try to find some replacement fruit trees.  As for the downed trees, the wood will help keep us warm next winter.