Red Fern Farm Blog

The "Toscano" kale won the race to germinate first of all the flats.

Life under the lights. Not the lights on Broadway, of course, but the lights we use for seed starting. Before January was over, we'd already filled the seed racks with more than 40 flats of herbs, flowers, and vegetables. That's more flats than we've ever had going at once.

But first, we had to build a new seed house to accommodate the increased production.


The new seed house--an oasis of calm in the sea of madness that is the barn.

We still need to get the fascia boards up on the exterior and we're working on installing the door, but the interior is in working order.

All of our seed-starting used to take place in the unheated storage room off of the garage. It was a tight squeeze, and the work flow wasn't ideal, but it did its job. When we finally made the decision to turn the storage room into the tiniest approved kitchen you could imagine, the seed stuff had to go. But where? We had no other good options, no extra storage rooms (or extra storage, period) lying around the farm. So we decided to build one. The big disadvantage: the cost (both in materials and our time and labor). But the advantages were worth it: total control over the location, dimensions, layout, insulation, heating and cooling, and all the materials used to build it. It's a germination chamber on steroids, and it runs hot. Really hot--even with the space heater set to low. We won't need that heater for long; we'll probably need to start running the air conditioning unit by March 1st.


Home Depot is wondering where their inventory of shop lights got to...

The day after Christmas, we scored about a dozen heavy-duty restaurant shelves for free, and they turned out to be perfectly suited as seed racks. (And the ones with stainless steel tabletops are perfectly suited for chicken processing, but that's another story.) A truly prodigious number of shop lights, fluorescent bulbs, and S hooks later, we were in business.


Out of production for now, but it'll get repurposed (like almost everything else)!

The old wooden seed starter, which was built by my mother more than 20 years ago, is still sturdy but holds less than a dozen flats. It's currently hosting a lot of construction debris and tools, but I've staked my claim and plan to convert it into an epic herb-drying cabinet. That's probably a project for next winter, but it will be a fun one.

So the 2012 season is well underway over here!

It's been a really long time since I blogged. I blame it on an exceptionally hot summer--heat indices in the 100s on a regular basis sapped my energy and left me feeling less than excited about the goings-on here during July and August. The garden really tests your endurance during those dog days; for weeks, my nights consisted of nothing but sweat dripping down my neck and dozens of mosquitoes feasting on all the little veins they could find left exposed by my sandals while I harvested endless tomatoes until it was too dark to see. But the days are getting shorter now, and the tomatoes scarcer, and I hardly know what to do with myself when it's dark come 8:30.

This is a welcome change. It feels like I've been waiting so long. There are even bigger changes that I'm waiting just a little longer for, but...I'm almost there. More on that very soon.

A good number of fall plants are already in, and even more are still waiting to be potted up or planted out. There's kale and cabbage under the row covers in the photo above, and the kale is just going crazy already. It loves the cooler weather, the rain, and the heaping handfuls of vermicompost we mixed into the holes as we planted. I've been yearning for kale for months--since it fled from the summer heat--and it's almost here.

We stripped the greenhouse of its old, torn plastic--the naked frame is visible on the right--and we obviously still have some work to do to get it in shape before the first frost comes and we need to shelter our tender perennials like lemon verbena, bay, and gotu kola.

This is the time of year I begin to look back at the frenzy of the last six months or so. I think about the successes and the failures, and all the things I meant to get done but didn't. That's the beauty of the upcoming season, though--it's perfectly suited to rest, and reflection, and planning for the future. It's heady stuff--the promise of free time! But there's still a tremendous amount of work to be done before December, when we take a month off from all but the most essential farm jobs. I still have to get through garlic planting without worrying myself half to death.

I have a laundry list of things I want to analyze and plan this winter...finally offering some on-farm workshops next year, fun farm events (maybe a potluck or two?), the herbal products I want to start selling at the market, whether or not to try an herb CSA or a pay-as-you-grow pilot program, getting a blog up and running for Crop Mob Upstate, and so much more. We'll have a permaculture plan to implement, too, by the end of the fall.

There are great things going on in the community, too--things that encourage and comfort me. It's easy to get so focused on my own farm that I start to feel rather alone; I need to get out more, make more connections. The recent Crop Mob activity has helped tremendously, and I can't wait for the mob in Greenville this Saturday. I expect that working in a community garden will be a lot like working in the garden at the Folk School, and that's a delightful thought. I don't think I've ever written about my time at the Folk School here on the farm blog, but I should do that sometime. In August, I gave a gift to a friend for his birthday--it was a little dream pillow filled with herbs. I told him that I'd dyed the fabric myself, and his first question was if I'd done it at the Folk School. When I said yes, he said, "That makes it even more special, because it came from the place that saved your life."

I paused at that statement--it was just so matter-of-fact. But then I realized: yeah. Yeah, it did. And here I am. Almost to the place I knew I needed to be when I left the Folk School four years ago. Almost there.

It's high summer around here, and you know what that means: we are all insanely busy from dawn to dusk and beyond. This is the time of year when the days (and the to-do lists) seem endless and we do our best just to keep ahead of the morning glories in the garden. Honestly: there is not a weed I loathe more than those damn morning glories. Not even horse nettle (maybe). They pop up overnight and if you're not on top of things, the next thing you know they're choking the life out of your tomatillos. Their only redeeming quality is that they're easy to pull.

After an intense wave of early heat, the temperatures have stabilized at about 90 degrees during the day, give or take, with the occasional brief thunderstorm. There's not been nearly enough rain from those storms, but that is absolutely par for the course and we're well used to it. The heat wreaked havoc on some of our early plantings--I'm still trying to get a planting of basil to take, and have fingers crossed for the most recent one--but most things are moving right along these days.

We continued to play "musical interns" through May, but things have settled down on that front now, much to our relief. Donna, our spring WWOOFer, came back to stay the season and we're currently hosting Meaghan, a short-term WWOOFer from New Hampshire. And in August, we'll have a short-term volunteer from France staying with us. But last week we bid (a temporary) goodbye to Annie, our part-time helper, for the season as she headed off to Australia for a semester of studying abroad. I have to say, I'm a little envious that she'll get two winters in a row--one Down Under and one when she's back state-side in December!

(You can tell how tired we are of the heat based on our after-dinner conversation the other night: Donna, Meaghan, Dad, and I spent a solid 10 minutes rhapsodizing about winter, cold temperatures, indoor activities, early bedtimes, and cheery fires in the hearth.)

If you're on our mailing list, you'll know by now that I've spent most of my "free" time recently cleaning garlic. With help from Annie, Donna, and Meaghan on that front, I've been able to take a breather and work on garbling herbs this week. The verb "garble" is usually used in the context of communication, meaning "to so alter or distort as to create a wrong impression or change the meaning," according to Merriam-Webster. But it also has a little-known alternate definition, and that is "to sift impurities from." That's precisely what you do when you're garbling herbs--you pick out any bits that aren't up to standard and prepare the good stuff for storage. Hand garbling is slow and laborious, but it's also a meditative process. And seeing big glass jars fill up with dried lavender and lemon balm and mint is a reward in and of itself.

I'm not quite done garbling all the lavender, but I have to switch back to the garlic tonight and tomorrow to get more ready for the market on Saturday. I hope our garlic customers have been enjoying the different varieties as much as I have! We've amassed quite a stash of too-small-to-sell bulbs from each variety and they're taking up part of a shelf in the pantry now. It's fun trying out the different varieties in different applications--last night, for instance, I was making a big batch of eggy rice to feed the hungry masses and grabbed some Ajo Rojo (a medium garlic) for a lovely and subtle cooked garlic flavor. I almost went with Brown Tempest (a much stronger variety) but decided to tone it down a bit since I was using yellow onion too. I've got another variety, Georgian Fire, that I haven't sampled yet but am looking forward to because it's supposed to be a really spicy one.

Last Friday, I flew to Vermont to learn how to build a yurt. I've been dying to know how for years now and though it's a simple enough structure, I figured it would be better to take a class than to go through the trial and error of teaching myself from books and pictures. It is a house, so to speak, with walls and a roof that have to stay standing, and I am notorious for not being able to make woodworking projects square.

So I made the trek to Yestermorrow Design Build School in Warren, Vermont, about an hour outside of Burlington. It was cool and wet in the mountains there, most unlike what we're experiencing here in Upstate South Carolina, and it was a slightly disorienting feeling to step backwards from the onset of summer to the middle of spring. Disorienting, but quite enjoyable.

In a little less than two days, our class built a 12' diameter yurt from scratch. We didn't worry about building a platform for this yurt because its permanent home would be at a meditation center in New York--we focused only on the steps necessary to go from a pile of wood and material to a finished yurt, and it was exhilarating. The class energy was good, and it was fun meeting a wide variety of people who had one thing in common: we all wanted to build a yurt, even though we each had a different impetus for that desire. The procedure wasn't complicated, and all of the equipment we used was quite common, from jigsaws and cordless drills to a miter saw and table saw. The more finished you want your yurt, the more tools you'll need, of course--our woodworking was basic, almost rustic, since there wasn't time for sanding, priming, and painting. The weekend was all about making a functional structure; making an aesthetically pleasing one falls to the individual going forward.

Saturday saw us divided up into three teams: one worked on the lattice wall, one on the roof ring, and one on the rafters. The instructors did a great job of mixing teams up as we went along, so that everyone was able to experience as many different aspects of the process as they wanted. A lot of thinking and figuring went into the roof ring at the beginning, but once the math made sense and work began, it came together pretty quickly.

I started out on rafters, and it was fun. There were 28 rafters all told, and each rafter required 5 cuts and one drilled hole, so we worked with a miter saw, jigsaw, and a power drill to knock that out. I had very little previous jigsaw experience, but got the hang of it quickly--it ended up being one of my favorite parts, although I would like to try cutting the curves with a coping saw as well.

Meanwhile, the lattice team breezed through their fabrication after they got their templates in order. We used nuts, bolts, and washers to connect the lattice--you can use lashing instead, but the metal hardware provides a more rigid wall, which was useful for our purposes. However, it's not so rigid that you can't fold up the entire lattice, which was neat.

By Sunday morning, we were working on the last stages of fabrication--door straps, the roof covering, and canvas walls. Geometry figures heavily into the fabrication of the roof covering (as does some pretty smelly glue) and it was interesting to watch it come together.

Before long, we were headed outside to begin construction. With about half a dozen people working on raising the lattice and rafters, it went very quickly.

The trickiest part by far was getting the rafters up. The bottom ends of the rafters sit on top of the yurt's steel tension cable (woven into the top notches of the lattice wall) and the curved top ends slide home into the roof ring. But the roof ring doesn't support itself until you have about six or eight rafters in place. So those of us who were inside setting it up had to wear hard hats to prevent injury from falling rafters. I didn't get hit in the head, but I did catch a rafter on its way down, and it had some momentum behind it.

Once the rafters are in, gravity keeps them in place up top and the tension cable keeps them snug at the bottom. Ingenious design.

The coverings went on very quickly and though there was some finish work that we left undone since Yestermorrow wasn't the yurt's final destination, it was complete enough to demonstrate the basics. Everything beyond this point is, once again, primarily aesthetics.

We hung out inside for a while, discussing the construction and alternative tactics for certain portions. During the class, we talked a lot about making it through the winter in a yurt, but I'm more concerned about making in through the summer in a yurt. I was able to talk to the instructors about possible solutions to the ventilation challenges I'll face, and I think I have a reasonable strategy to test. I won't be able to have a dome here in South Carolina--the top of the yurt is too important of a ventilation point to seal it up, so I'm planning on constructing an octagonal cupola instead, with small windows that will open to draw the air up and out. I'll also need to include at least one additional door or window frame, for cross-ventilation. But these are not daunting challenges. The biggest challenges, as I see them, are permitting and figuring out electric and water/septic options. (That's where my mom, who was the general contractor when we built our house on the farm, will come in very handy.)

Once we'd basked in the glow of building a yurt for about an hour, we broke it down again and loaded it up for transport to its permanent site. Amazingly, it all fit in the back of a small truck.

I came back from Vermont rested and ready to build a yurt. The possibilities are exciting, and the potential for literally endless customization very much appeals to the designer in me. I'm in love with the idea of building the mostly beautifully crafted yurt I can, with painted wood and canvas and all sorts of delightful little details.

Infrastructure will be a challenge, but I have every confidence that I can build the actual structure with relative ease. So maybe by the fall I'll be ready to host a yurt-raising party on the farm...at the very least, I know I'm going to start building a test lattice when I take a week off of work after the Farm Tour, and start doing the math for a larger yurt (24' perhaps--twice the size of the one we built in Vermont). Either way, just knowing that building my own yurt is within reach is the second-best feeling in the world right now.

(The best being that the garlic harvest is underway and it's looking light years better than last year's!)

May is underway with a new season of the Saturday Market, a new intern who arrived last night, and the second baby donkey to be born on the farm. Meet Dilly Bean, Luna's baby.

He's not a she like we were hoping, but that's okay--we're still keeping him! Both colts will be gelded and will stay here on the farm as guardians for the sheep. The idea is that donkeys that were born here on the farm and have been with the sheep since day one will be even better guardians since they'll see the sheep as "their" herd. On a shallow note, I have to admit that I think Dilly Bean is cuter than Basil, if that's even possible. Now we wait until next spring to see if Darcy, our intact jack, bred Eclipse, one of our other donkeys.

The first Saturday Market went very well this past weekend, though we were all pretty worn out by the end of it! Rebekah met us downtown and helped run the booth--it was busy enough that all four of us were constantly answering questions, bagging plants and produce, and making change, and we were glad for the help! The crowd seemed a little smaller than opening day last year, but obviously it was still a great experience and we hope everyone will continue to come out and support local farms.

The other big event of the past week was shearing day last Thursday. Shearing is something that we humans dread, but which the sheep probably look forward to--they're always much more sprightly and energetic after they've been released from several pounds of hot, heavy wool in the spring. This year our Australian shearer friends weren't able to come, but Jonathan and Ben, a father-son team from North Carolina who've been out before, filled in and were able to shear 60+ sheep in about 3 hours. Now it falls to us to skirt all those bags of wool and send the adult wool off to be processed into blankets and the lambswool into roving for Mom to spin. There's one especially crimpy fleece that we're saving back to process by hand--I think I'd like to dye it too, to make it into a really special yarn.

In the meantime, I'm keeping a close eye on the garlic. As you can see, it needs to be weeded one last time before harvest, and I've started harvesting scapes, so look for those at the market this weekend. I'm trying not to stress out too much about the garlic. I know what signs to look for, I know that drydown needs to start and the mulch probably needs to come off when we weed, and I know that the scapes need to get harvested. The rest is up to the garlic. I've done everything I possibly can to nurture it and give it the best place to grow; now all that's left is the harvest. At least tonight I'll enjoy some scapes in my dinner, along with green onions, chard, chives, and eggs all fresh from the farm. It's good to have plenty of fresh produce available again!

I'm falling down on my blogging duties. There are so many things I wish I had photos of--things like the sugar snap peas in flower, and garlic scapes forming, and calendula starting to bud, but every last minute of daylight on the farm for the past two weeks has been devoted to watering transplants, planting out, weeding, harvesting, feeding lambs, moving sheep and donkeys, starting seeds, preserving, cooking and so on. When racing against the dark, it's hard to squeeze in some time for photography.

It's been two hectic weeks--Donna, our amazing spring WWOOFer, headed out for her summertime farm gig in Pennsylvania on the 23rd, the same day Mom and I made the drive downtown to give some fiber arts demos at the Children's Museum of the Upstate. We already miss Donna a lot; her help was absolutely critical this spring when the unexpected kept happening. Without her around, I'm sure I would have had a nervous breakdown when Mom was ill. But Donna is a trouper, and she kept things alive in the greenhouse and the bottle lambs fed, which freed Mom up for some much-needed recuperation time.

That's Donna with Carmen, one of the seven bottle lambs we had this spring. We've never had so many at once, and Donna spent a lot of time playing mama and giving them the attention they needed! 

Pictured above are five of the seven (Rosie and Josephine decided to hang out in the barn the morning I took this) and from left to right they're Ethel, Carmen, Ricky, Lucy, and Fred. After the first four, we ran out of sitcom names and Donna just picked what she thought suited them. They're all Tunis lambs except for Ricky and Carmen who are technically both Coopworth crosses (they're twins), though they couldn't look less alike. Genetics are funny sometimes. He's a porker and she's the most delicate of the bunch.

They're gaining weight at an astonishing rate, chasing the barn cats and the chickens and chowing down on all the grass in the paddock near the barn. Lots of lamb-pedes occur during the course of the day as they run up and down and around, leaping and bounding. They've almost passed the stage of cuteness (well, Fred passed it a while back because he's got no manners at all and will actually jump up like a dog and paw you to see if you'll produce a bottle of milk for him), but they're still fun to watch.

So things settled down on the arrival and departure front for a little bit, until we had a very unexpected arrival this past weekend: a baby donkey! Meet Basil (pronounced a la Basil Rathbone), a jack and the first donkey born on the farm.

His mama, Lizzie, is one of two donkeys we purchased last summer, and we knew there was a possibility that she was bred back when we got her. Donkeys have a very long gestation--11 months--so we weren't sure exactly when to expect a foal, if there was one. So last Friday night, Dad came in and said that Lizzie's udder looked like it might be filling up, and we needed to go out on Saturday to check her. When he and Mom went out the next day, it was very obvious that Lizzie was not pregnant, because she'd already had her foal! Now, we've seen a LOT of baby animals born in our 15 years here, but Basil takes the cake for sheer cuteness. (Dad was so taken that he insisted that I take pictures and post them ASAP!) His ears and knees are so huge compared to the rest of him, and though he'll grow into them, right now he looks like a giant stuffed toy. He feels like one, too--I didn't get close enough to touch him, but Mom's already been working with him and says he's soft and fuzzy.

Lizzie's pasture-mate, Luna, may also be about ready to foal, so we're keeping an eye on her. We're hoping for a jenny this time.

In the meantime, the first Saturday Market is this weekend in Greenville, and we're making sure we have plenty of tomato plants, cut herbs, and fresh greens ready for sale. The first market of the season is always the most terrifying for me (what if I forget the basil plants??) but it's like riding a bike: once you get on it, it all comes back to you. I'm looking forward to greeting familiar faces at our booth as well as meeting new ones.

And after the market, one more arrival: our new intern, Eric. We're looking forward to having him here and can't wait to get started on lots of great things for the summer! 

Or at least a very challenging one right now. Mom went to the ER on Saturday night--what we thought was a dislocated rib ended up being shingles. Awesome.

So, now we're throwing everything we can at it to beat the virus as quickly as possible, minimize the chances of long-term neuralgia, and manage her pain in the meantime. Conventional medicine prescribed her antivirals and painkillers, I'm going the herbal route with lemon balm tea and salve, and Traditional Chinese Medicine is in the game with acupuncture and herbal supplements. Yesterday didn't go so well--the painkillers are the only thing making much headway, and they make her sick and woozy--but we're just taking it day by day. Between those three approaches, something must work.

In the meantime, I'm in full-on crisis mode. The immediate needs are being cared for: Donna, our exemplary WWOOFer, is making sure the most critical parts of day-to-day farm operations get taken care of (bottle feeding lambs, potting up the most time-sensitive plants, and keeping things watered). Rebekah, our wonderful friend and volunteer, potted up about 200 tomatoes herself on Saturday, came out last night to bring us dinner (which was delicious), and is coming out again this weekend. Without their help, we would really be in the weeds, so I can't thank either of them enough. My top priority for the next few days is somehow getting some of the plants under the pergola in the ground--if I have to do it by flashlight tomorrow night, then so be it.

At the same time, I worry what this will mean for our season, and it's pretty much the worst thing in the world to see your mother in pain and be unable to do much about it. This is probably one of the most stressful things to happen in the last 3 years--moreso than last year's garlic harvest (and that means a lot, coming from me).

At least the basil is happy.

It's been a stressful week here at the farm, with some things coming to an abrupt end and other things just getting started. It takes us all a little time to adjust, but I'm confident that in the long run this season will be better for the changes that have taken place. It feels a little like a fresh start came with the advent of spring on Sunday.

In between prepping for our first market of the year (this Saturday in Travelers Rest), I took a minute to document an amusing phenomenon. You might have heard gardeners and farmers talk about aggressive plants before--mint is the one tarred with that brush the most often--that manage to pop up in unexpected places from season to season, whether it's by spreading or hearty re-seeding. And I bet you never thought you would hear about garlic galivanting around like that...but it's happened here.

I first noticed it by the front steps in midwinter. I thought, "Oh, that's cute--a couple of reject bulbs fell off the side of the porch when I was cleaning the garlic last summer, and they took root."

And then I saw this near the swing under the oak tree. And I thought, "Hmm, I guess I must have dropped a few cloves of Spanish Roja over here the day I was cleaning under the tree."

Which is just about the time that this got unearthed in the woods when we built the spearmint bed:

More! This, I realized, must be some of the Kettle River Giant bulbs that succumbed to neck rot and ended up thrown in the woods.

It's amusing how dead-set those cloves are on life--these were the reject bulbs, the worst of the worst, inedible. And they fell on some of the most inhospitable ground on the farm! Some brave cloves even managed to anchor themselves next to the annual bed--they're not pictured, but they are growing on solid ground that has never been broken. Now, none of these plants will form a bulb this year because they're mostly growing above ground. But if I gave them a few years, their roots would contract--very slowly but very surely--and pull the successive plants down and down and down until they were safe in the ground. It's really fascinating to watch, and I may leave the cloves in the woods to live out their natural cycle.

Of course, this is where the bulbs will happen:

And I resolve to be a little more circumspect in my cleaning efforts this year--no more escapee garlic!

After the unseasonably warm temperatures two weeks ago and a stormy start to March, things seem to be settling into a more typical pattern for this time of year. The days are warm when the sun is at its zenith, but on either side of that peak the air still has a chill to it that turns to cold in the dark. This suits me just fine, since a gradual warm-up is far more beneficial to my garlic.

Speaking of the garlic, it got weeded for the first time this past week and looks well. The straw mulch helped to regulate the soil temperature during our warm spell, and the recent rains (and its first round of liquid fish fertilizer) should spur some further leaf development. I have my eye on a few plants that shouldn't be left in the ground to bulb--they're the ones that are sprouting two to four stems instead of just one, and they'll be candidates for green garlic use pretty soon. When this happens, I know those plants are sprouting from ninja cloves that were stuck together so seamlessly we never even noticed when we were cracking them apart to plant. Since they're growing in clusters, the individual plants will never form proper bulbs, so I'll rogue them out for fresh eating.

I've been estimating a harvest time of mid-May for the garlic, but that's discounting the effect of the mulch and assuming conditions will be hot and dry as we head into April and May. If the mulch keeps the soil temperature down considerably, we may be looking at a later harvest date. It's hard to say at this point, so we'll just wait and see. Possible benefits of a later harvest date include larger bulb size and better bulb longevity--two results that would be most welcome. Possible drawbacks include later availability of that space for summer crops, but we can work around that. 

Elsewhere, the forsythia is blooming. There's something funny about those violently colorful flowers against the cold, wet gray and brown of the slowly awakening landscape. I never see them that I don't think back to the vivid yellow grains of the saffron rice my grandmother fixed for family dinners when I was a child.

The greenhouse just keeps on rolling. The first of the basil seedlings are up, and they'll no doubt languish now for a while--basil likes a good sulk. But the spearmint has absolutely no qualms about vigorous growth right now, and this week we'll be constructing a new mint bed on the edge of the woods. I gave the first batch of onions a good haircut this weekend and saved the tops; we later ate them in zucchini fritters, along with dill and mint from the garden and greenhouse. The zucchini came from a big batch we shredded and froze last summer, and it was very tasty. All of the alliums in the greenhouse--bulb onions, bunching onions, and leeks--are due to be planted out this coming Saturday.

There was a distinct lack of activity on the farm this past weekend, both due to the welcome rain and the fact that we were all up in Asheville for this year's Organic Growers School spring conference. Though my parents have been to the spring conference numerous times, this was my first visit--and I loved it. I took the Herbs track, and spent 6 hours learning about glycerites, medicinal herbs, Chinese medicine, and tea herbs. It was exciting and inspiring. I've been interested in medicinal herbs since I was in high school, but I'd never before had a chance to take a class about them--any knowledge I had was purely academic, learned from books. But now I feel empowered to begin practicing the techniques I was exposed to this weekend. If nothing else, I absolutely must make a bee balm glycerite this summer, because it was my favorite glycerite of all the ones we tried in class--it's hard to believe something so delectable is also medicinal! 

This weekend was crazy busy--so much so that I have only one photo to share this week. From a distance, it's relatively unassuming, but what I found so appealing about the snapdragon seedlings above was their miniscule size. Their tiny green stems are hardly wider than a thread right now, but someday they'll support great spikes of beautiful blooms. It's sometimes easy to forget that everything starts small.

Last weekend was not small in any way, however. I took Friday off of work--I needed a mental health day, if you will--and spent most of it in the greenhouse, watering and fertilizing. While there, I made sure to measure the light levels under the shadecloth; we took it off in January but were forced to replace it a week and a half ago when temperatures inside the greenhouse soared to 110* on a sunny day. With the shadecloth back in place, the temperatures almost immediately dropped to a balmy 80*. But we were worried that with the sun at its winter angle, not enough light was making it through the shadecloth. I used my camera to measure the foot-candles in three different spots, and to our relief there's still plenty of light. The seedlings agree, and have only gotten bigger in the past week.

On Saturday, I prepped the lavender beds (at last!) and with Mom's help, placed landscape fabric over them. Meanwhile, there was a mulching frenzy going on in the annual bed where Rachel and Chad worked with Dad to cover all the walkways with old issues of Stockman Grass Farmer and a layer of straw. Almost 100% of all of our cultivated soil is now covered with mulch (or planted with garlic, kale, and chard and mulched), so we're making good progress on laying the foundation for a no-till system.

Sunday was the big day--I was out at 7:30 a.m. sharp, measuring the lavender beds and placing markers every 4'. Then I loaded up the garden cart with a whole host of amendments--bags of composted manure, lime, bonemeal, and round stone--and Mom and I got to work. With the glee of an alchemist trying to turn lead into gold, she mixed those root-boosting amendments for the lavender plants while I planted them out. To my mother's credit, they overwintered remarkably well and had healthy and vigorous root systems. We managed to get 36 plants in the ground--half of our total 75. The rest will go in this week and then all that's left to do is mulch with pea gravel and set up the irrigation system. My legs are still sore from all of the planting squats I did, but it's so satisfying to see the orderly rows stretching out across the ground.

Sugar snap peas also went out on Sunday, and the first of our basil was started yesterday. Broccoli and cauliflower go out tomorrow, and onions when the next root day comes around. It's becoming very plain that we're going to run out of space to plant before the garlic comes out in mid-May, so I'm trying to devise some interplanting strategies. From a planning perspective, I'm already looking forward to next spring, when the entirety of the slope in front of the house will be jam packed with permaculture beds!