Farm Tour Friday 1/7/2022

Happy New Year! We brought the new year in with the clanging of pots and pans in our driveway as loud as we could hoping that our neighbor down the road might have heard our excitement. My girls though it was great fun heading out at midnight with pots and pans in hand laughing among each other saying that mom has really lost it this time. Once they heard the celebration of others in the far off distance they joined right in banging as hard as they could to send a reply of the joy that the new year was here.

We enjoyed our time off with our family and it felt good to have recharged our batteries during the holidays. We played lots of board games, watched many movies, and ate wonderful food. Taking the time to relax and do as little as possible on the farm for a few days really did these farmers good.

A little garland I made for our holiday table our of fresh eucalyptus and dried flowers. All from our farm.

Now is it time to get back to work and start the new year off right.

On Christmas Eve the crew finished the construction of our new 34’ x 96’ high tunnel. To say that we were a little excited about it being complete is an understatement. My mom and I definitely jumped up and down with pure excitement when the crew left . We have worked so hard to get to the point and to see this part of the project done was amazing. Now we can begin to add soil and compost to the beds for planting. In my mind I have already planted and harvested the ranunculus crop in there. I have Tecolote ranunculus planned for this house.

Our new high tunnel!!!

We started moving compost into the other high tunnels to get the beds ready for our first crop of anemones. The corms we started a few weeks ago have loads of roots and are starting to grow leaves. This is the stage that we like to plant them. We pre-sprout the anemones to make sure they are actively growing before they are planted. This helps with less loss to rot of the corms.

Our gutter connect house got compost on the beds.

Anemone corms staring to grow.

We also have continued to remove our heirloom chrysanthemums from our high tunnels to over winter them in our propagation house. This process seems to be taking a good bit of time because we want to make sure that each variety is correctly labeled as it gets moved into another greenhouse. We have 35 varieties to dig and pot up. Not as big as our Great Dahlia Dig , but definitely just as important.

Snow fell over night covering the farm in a blanket of snow.

As the week went on it got cold. I mean it is January it’s suppose to be cold but that doesn’t mean we like it. The lows reach the low teens with a wind chills in the single digits, brrrrr. It snowed and covered the farm in a 3 inch blanket of snow. All the high tunnels were fine with that amount of snow, so we didn’t have to clear the snow off the tunnels. The new high tunnel did exactly what it was supposed to do. The snow just slid right off its gothic style roof.

The thermostat in our propagation house readying 52 degrees and the temperature outside was in the low teens. The heater is working great lets hope it continues to work.

Our firewood stack on our front porch. We use wood as supplement heat for our house.

Now that the weekend is here I am going to sit by the fire keeping warm while going through all of the seed catalogs that have arrived. Thanks for joining me for Farm Tour Friday. Have a great weekend!