The farming has officially begun!! Adam and I finally put some seeds and plants in the ground on Friday and Saturday as the rain held off until dark on Saturday night. Our tomato starts look wonderful- all 300 of them! We have a great assortment of heirloom varieties. We did buy about 45 organic tomato starts from Melanie Hernandez at Youngs Mill Plant Farm in Kingston, GA because we were unsure about how ours would do- but it turns out that our method of seeding in soil blocks (prescribed by Elliot Coleman) made beautiful, strong tomato starts. We will have the following varieties: Cherokee Purple, Green Zebra, Yellow Brandywine, Arkansas Traveler, Roma, Aunt Ruby's German Cherry, Principe Borghese, Kellogg, and one more I can't think of at the moment. Get ready to have heirloom tomato sandwiches, salsas and more!
We also planted about 100 pepper plants. We have a good mix of sweet peppers and hot peppers. We planted eggplant (2 varities) and basil. We seeded our first successions of green beans (2 varieties), black eyed peas, sweet corn, pickling and eating cucumbers, zucchini and summer squash. Oh, and we planted about 90 sweet potato slips! Next weekend we will be putting in our okra, along with more corn, peas, squash and more! We also finally took some pictures of our area, although we still need a panoramic shot of the field.
Adam also got the fence up and running. Now we just have to install the gate and get another charger to increase our voltage. The fence will hopefully deter the deer from eating our crops! The other good news is that Adam only has one week of teaching school before he becomes a full-time farmer! He spent every waking hour this weekend tirelessly working on the farm and loving every minute of it. He used our new tiller and my dad's tractor for the first time this weekend and really transformed our field into beautiful beds of rich soil. We also planted 1 acre of buckwheat for a cover crop. We are competing with some aggressive grasses (Johnson Grass) so we are trying to introduce some healthy competition!
The pictures from top to bottom: Those are our sweet potato slips freshly planted; my brother, Jordan, and his daughter, Alyssa on my dad's Ford tractor; a beautiful storm cloud headed for us; our first bed of tomato plants; Mecca seeding flats of tomatoes about a month ago.
Congratulations! I found you at localharvest.org and am so excited for you both. I'm a "former" biologist (now stay ay home mom to triplets) with a passion for local, sustainable food. We are not far from you (Acworth) and look forward to seeing your progress. We'll come and see you at one of the markets and maybe even visit at the farm (if you are doing that) this summer. Best wishes!!
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