Spring is keeping me busy

I haven’t written an update in a couple of weeks!  Things have been busy here with farming and with life.  The girls enjoyed taking their friends to a tour of the pigs during their birthday party, and I told the children, to the horror of some, that these pigs would be dinner.  There were no vegetarians present, and so I reminded them that the bacon they enjoyed came from a pig, and it was probably a pig who was confined to a building who never got to enjoy the outdoors.

In the garden, pollen season has arrived and everything has decided it is time to grow.  I am experimenting with growing tomatoes in the hoophouse this year.  I set them out inside the tunnel in early March.  

Our temperatures have remained above freezing, but even temperatures below 40 will damage the plants, and so on the colder nights I have tucked them under another layer of rowcover inside the hoophouse. 

They seem to be reasonably happy in there, and I hope to be able to have an early crop of tomatoes.  The soil in the entire garden is still pretty rough.  I also have trouble with water draining into the garden area from the top of the hill.  

The soil is a work in progress: a little over a year ago this garden site was a pine forest and it has suffered the ravages of a bulldozer.  The raised beds have saved my garden this winter, and I can protect the soil in the beds from further compaction by my feet.  It will get better, but having to use a tool to get through a dry crust on top of the soil is pretty discouraging when I could open rows with my fingers in my old garden. 

I have faith that good treatment and lots of organic matter will bring this soil to life, although I won’t put down heavy layers of mulch the way I did in my old garden because it makes a great habitat for snakes.  I will have to tell you my snake story later.