Picture Montage! (to show the progress we have made) of making beds and hoein' beds for future squash plants

                    February 19th: See Chris way down in the middle background there? Intended to plant our market crop of beans here. Preparing the beds by scraping and forking up the purple velvet grass and salt grass. The foreground are our beds in cover crop. Nice and green, but some of them were not really growing much of the cover crop. Some beds mostly have the weedy annual grasses coming back.

February 19th: Probably spaded and forked about 1/4 each of 2 beds by this time. Chris likes the spade and I liked the fork.

February 19th: Later in the day we got through what could be 3 beds worth of purple velvet grass and salt grass

April 8th: we got behind on finishing the block and the rains kept the grasses growing. We learned a new technique for preparing beds by using a hoe to re-break up the roots and shaping them and then we will cover them with rice straw mulch which will help the grasses decay and their roots will hopefully not continue to grow back

April 8th: I decided that I really like using the hoe! I do not like using the spading/scraping technique.

April 8th: Compare these 3 beds to the picture of Chris with the 3 beds we worked on in February. Nice, huh?!

April 8th: Mostly "prepared" (just a little strip we didn't complete) before we put the mulch on at a later date

Just an update on a section of the farm. These lower future blocks had been worked 2 years ago by "The Bohemians" (a former group of farming ladies who leased part of the land), but they couldn't get in their rototiller during a wet winter and so they eventually disbanded and then the area was left as you see it in the very first picture with mostly purple velvet grass. We are preparing this area with a mostly fresh start so it's hard work. We will be hoeing and scraping these lower sections and mulching them to allow to roots to die back so that later in the season we can try and grow some winter squash. Winter squash should do well in an area that is prepared in such a way since they grow so easily with minimal effort (ever had a compost pile that sprouts tons of squash seedlings? Yeah, this is kinda a similar circumstance as we will basically be composting the green material under the mulch, so a squash seed should do very well). Originally the plan was to prepare 6 blocks with 8 beds each in this section and grow our cover crop of different varieties of beans to sell as a market crop. This may have been way too ambitious for the first year. Maybe next year. But hopefully our squashes are prolific!

We have gotten behind due to the intermittent rains and my lack of being able to be there more than 1 day a week, but that will be changing now that we are soon to be residents of Sebastopol. We will be only a 2.5 mile drive from the farm! Yeah! looking forward to our country life.

Late night farming (this is our farm mentor, Yeti's, famous garlic beds by bike light)