Birdsfoot Farm

Dear friends,I just finished a race of word search with Kira and she always wins. Today I won with the handicap of five (because I am older and it is not my first language).  I am still not happy, just want to win it all, oh well.
As you can see all is well at the farm.  This week I planted first carrots and 1000' of parsnips, prepared the onion beds.  The lay out with strings helps to imagine the tractor paths versus the 4' wide beds.I also transplanted celeriac into 9-pack cell containers.  I got about 550 transplanted and two channels still need it, they were too small. 

Yesterday was such a beautiful sunny warm 60ies day and we had community workday.  Most Saturdays are community workdays where we do things like cleaning up, stacking firewood or canning and freezing.  This week we cleaned up the firewood site from the main-house to prepare for a wood shed to be built this year.  It has been a decade long dream to have a wood shed attached to the main-house so we can just roll in the wheelbarrow of firewood into the house without pushing through a foot of snow up the icy ramp.

A gigantic box elder tree had come down a few years ago and was laying down in the spot.  It took the group hours to dismantle the rotten thing with axes, pushing and pulling.  In the end it was done and the yard looks beautiful.

Patreesha weeded the front yard and I got 5  bags of composted tree soil out if it. Next week when the tractor is hopefully back we are planning to clean up the veggie compost site and built some proper bins to get out of wet sloppy compost.  Motivated Birdsfooters can get a lot done in a day.

Steve and I  also cleaned two of our hugging-house rain barrels with one still giving us water to wash hands and dishes.  Every spring we clean the system to have water for the year that we collect of our roof.  We bring drinking water in a gallon jug from the main-house.

We ended the day with a pavalone desert from Katrina ( a desert made from egg whites, sugar, pudding and almonds from New Zealand)  and a bonfire, not bad.

I hope you get to enjoy spring as well, we are lucky to be in the country side.
Dulli

Dear friends,
all well here at the farm.  I am sitting in the Hugging House while Steve is doing progress reports for each student and cooking dinner for all.  It is raining and I managed to rake out beds and plant spinach and Mixed Salad Greens this morning.    It is nice to relax and give those muscles a little time to catch up. I am getting stronger by the day and with hot showers in the evenings I manage to not get sore anymore.

The cows say hi and want more green grass to eat, the hay is not very good.  We spent eight hours yesterday to put up almost two acres of fencing wire for the new cow pasture.  I had put in the posts and corner braces last week.

As I told you before those 330' rolls of fence are so heavy.  I invented a method for them to unroll of the back off the tractor by turning the hay-round-bale spear up.  I put a pipe on the draw bar of the tractor (usually used to hitch a wagon)  to make it longer for the contraption to sit on and the spear not to drag on the ground.  We moved and old rickety table next to the rolls of wire, heaved them onto the table, stood them up and with the help of super strong Len and enough strong Steve and me we lifted the rolls high and slid them onto the spear.  Off drives the tractor and unrolls the fence along the posts. Steve and Len hammered in the staples as I kept unrolling and tightening the fence.  We got faster with practice and were cruising until I hit a wet spot from a year round spring that I knew about but did not see it as wet as it was since I usually don't drive there.  And that was that .  By 1.30pm the tractor was stuck.  When I saw it coming I couldn't speed it up enough to cruise through because it was unrolling the fencing slowly.  I tried to get out with wooden pieces and digging around, by then the water was running through the holes in the rims and decided to have lunch.  After squash soup and green beans (frozen last summer) I tried some more and then did the hard walk to the phone.  No farmer likes to acknowledge that they got stuck to another farmer, it is a failure.  But the only way out before the rain today was a bigger tractor.   My neighbor Rusty came in ten minutes and in another 10 minutes we had the tractor out.  No teasing, no bad comments, just working hand in hand with social distancing for us and the tractors to get it done.  Thank you Rusty, I guess we all have been there before.
When I had my first week in Germany apprenticing on a dairy farm in 1984 I got that tractor stuck and I had to go and tell the farmer.  He came and was not excited , but said as long as one does not keep trying until the axles are dug in deep he will not be mad and to come right away if it happens again.  Thanks to him I did not get too stuck.So we finished fencing at 6pm and after milking Carol and brushing the cows there were home made french fries with ketchup and green beans waiting for me.  A good day!
Last week I also planted the first peas, soaked the night before to germinate faster, but they are not up so far with the cold nights.  I have to make fires in the wood stove in the greenhouse every evening to keep the tomato transplants in there from freezing. 
This week the tractor will go to get a new exhaust and tail pipe put on. The muffler fell off last fall and was driven over, so no fixing that. I ordered the new exhaust this year as I had run out of funds last fall and had put up with the noise.  It is a new season CSA payments are coming in and and the local shop Star Route Services on RT 25 will put it on.  While "Joan" the tractor is there they also will adjust the front wheel spacing to line up with the back wheel spacing. The chisel plow will also be adjusted to that spacing .
I am planning to try the permanent bed method where you have 14"tractor aisles and 4' bed between.  The first years the beds have to be forked deep by hand to break up crusts built up over the years by tractor implements sliding down there at the same depth year after year, called plough-pan.  I had heard  about this for a long time and finally got a book on it.  Intuitively it speaks to me to not just disc all the soil several times before planting, compacting under the wheels and airing the soil which activates soil live to burn up carbon.  The goal is less tillage.  Some folks have perfected it to where the beds are loose enough to seed into and not have to till at all and with that also not bring up weed seeds to the surface.  No weeds, what a dream.  These folks do add a lot of compost and minerals and bio nutrients and are busy with other things.  I pick and take from it what seems right to me.  I don't want to add a lot of outside produced minerals.  Cow manure and haylage from the neighbors are good for me for now.  For you garden or soil nerds here is the book:"No Till Intensive Vegetable Culture" by Brian O'Hara.
I am spending part of each day deep forking 4' wide beds and had to fix the tines several times by unbolting the bent or broken one and bolting a new 12' bolt in and sawing off the head of the bolt at the bottom to create a tine.  It is time consuming and frustrating.  I ordered a new better deep digging fork .  The shipping is delayed because half the country is putting in a garden and forking.  Fortunately this spring is dryer as the past three and as it is still cold no crops are growing and I can take time to prepare the beds instead of rushing everything in at the end of April.

Check out these new cloth masks that Kate sewed for every Birdsfooter.  Henry in the picture and I still hold the badminton cooperative competitive record of 44 volleys.  It was cold and windy and when they got out to try to beat it,  it was dusk and they could not see the birdy very well then.  So I would like to challenge you all to see if you can do better then us.  The winner at the end of the month will win 5lb of our favorite "Carola"potatoes.  Henry wants me to tell you that the net is 5'tall and we try to get any bird even if it wants to go out.
Henry is Katrina Hebb's son.  They moved to Birdsfoot North, next door in March.  Katrina is the new Presbyterian minister in Potsdam and so glad to be back in the North Country.  If you remember she was the baker for the Black Bird Cafe when it opened in 2001?  There is nothing better then to be stuck at home in a pandemic  with an accomplished baker and she surprises us with chocolate pudding, chocolate chip banana oatmeal cookies or coconut chocolate macaroons at dinner for desert.  You get the idea, I love it.
Well, this getting long.  Here a few pictures of the recent transplants and seedlings.

please sign up for the CSA if you can. Click HERE to download the CSA application form.
and click HERE to download the Bonus Bucks application form (financial discount)

Love, Dulli