April Farm Report




- First farmer's market is in less then four weeks - hooray! We should have plenty of eggs from our over-wintered hens for opening day, but hopefully we'll also have our new pullets here and laying by then.

- The usual start up costs are overwhelming this season - feed costs have nearly doubled! - but we'll cross our fingers, lose a little sleep and forge ahead...

- E's first bees came last week, a package from Georgia, brought up the coast by a local guy who owns a pollination service. Mary will have a nuc ready for us in May, and hopefully we'll be able to catch a swarm or two as well this season. E already had to put a honey super on our strong hive - it's looking good for our spring harvest! He went out this afternoon and opened the new hive for the first time - the queen was released, accepted, and has started laying eggs.
* the difference between a package and a nuc of bees is that a package is a few pounds of bees and a queen that they haven't "met" yet - they slowly release her from her cage, and in that time you hope they come to accept her. A nuc is a few pounds of bees and a queen, as well as a few frames of eggs and developing bee babies - you don't have to worry about the workers rejecting the queen and the hive gets established more quickly. .

- I haven't mentioned it here - didn't want to jinx ourselves! - but I think pig move number 2 can be officially declared a success. Roko and Lola have settled in nicely to their pasture digs, so now we have to see how they take to being moved to a new section of the garden in a week or two. We've been bribing them into a large dog crate with food and moving them that way, so until they get too big, we will probably stick with that method.

- Scallions, peas, carrots, beets, mizuna, mesclun, arugala, and dino kale are all up and running. I stripped one of last year's tomato beds of landscape fabric tonight, so will turn that and plant it with more spring crops tomorrow. I'm anxious to get summer crops in, but we'll probably plant those as the spring veggies are harvested, since the scallions and radishes will be up and out very soon. Only one bed of peas is trellised, so that's another chore for the to-do list.

- I'm debating getting into mushroom production this year...still thinking it over.

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Posted: Thu - April 17, 2008 at 03:19 PM        

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