Spring is coming!

Around the farm, the signs that Spring is coming are everywhere.  The birds are up early and stay up later in the night.  Just this week, we spied crows gathering nesting materials.  The frogs are croaking and the broad beans are flowering!

This descending moon, we began to till in the cover crops on the new land.  Eleven months after acquiring this land and the soil is starting to glow with all the added compost.  I love the look of the freshly turned soil and love seeing all of the worms!!

The compost looks and smells terrific.

And the Spring sugar snaps have germinated!

The glasshouse is filled with cool season crops like brassicas, lettuce and fennel already germinated and ready to plant in the next fortnight.  While the tomatoes, capsicums and eggplant are on the heat pads.

Although we planted a few things for the spring share last Autumn, the late winter seeding for the season began three weeks ago.

Our direct seeder, a Jang, has different wheels for different size seeds.  I used a trick from Joyce Wilke and Michael Plane of Allsun Farm to organise the seed and the wheels together...large snap lock bags!

We built a glasshouse in June/July.  Our builder friend Dave told us about a whole house full of big laminated windows that were going to be smashed and binned during the house remodel.  Recycled materials seem to have a way of looking so good...but there are usually hiccups.  In the case of these windows, we never imagined how heavy they were.  Six men could barely lift ONE window!!  In came the crane. The glasshouse is a passive solar structure that with the use of heat stores and venting should be warm in winter and early spring and cool in summer.  It will be a great place to start all of our crops, protecting them from weather until they are strong enough to be planted.

With time off school, Maya and Rye helped too!

Thank you to Alan and Lionel for building the glasshouse, Dave for telling us about the windows and all of those hefty fellows for helping get the windows out of the house!

In the next few weeks, we hope to construct a polytunnel for the tomatoes, make soilblocks for all of the warm weather crops, more and more and more seeding, finish pruning the fruit trees...the list is long and we love the energy of Spring which helps to get it all done! Two interns are arriving this weekend too, ready to jump in to the Spring season.  We are still taking applications for the Summer and Autumn Internships.

We are hoping that our CSA season will begin in October.  If you are interested in the Spring share, please sign up as we will be sending information about what to expect in the share and the size of the shares in the next few weeks.