Weekend Warrior: Farm Edition.

We put another day into the books this weekend, finishing up some seeding in our Delburne Plot. A total of 8 beds planted, around 75 feet long, with two rows in each bed. This will greatly expand produce this year, so much so that I believe I will have to start looking into being a vendor at a local market this year (squeals of excitement!).

On top of our seeding, we tilled over a new section to add 4 more rows onto our 12! So a total of 16 beds - 75 foot rows are being formed! This is getting close to an acre of land tilled for our market garden! Ben's goals is to constantly improve on the year before and we are definitely doing it, with higher efficiency with our time at the farm, and building on our beds, working out the weeds and prepping for future growth! #parttimehustle #fulltimemuscle .. I don't know if I could find two more applicable hashtags than those for the few weeks! Once we hop out of the truck at the farm, its basically 100% hustle and muscle until we need to get back on the road home. We are incredibly dirty and sweaty and sore by the end of it. I imagine Red Deer thinks we are the reddest necks around! (Our stop on the way home for milkshakes and/or ice capps).

When we got out to inspect the garden, I was most excited to see that our mammoth sunflowers have already popped up and near 100% germination rates! So I then tried to convince Ben that we become the next Spitz and go full sunflower farmer! It was a fleeting thought, but I basically have the theory that, what ever can grow out in Delburne with minimal maintenance, we plant even more the next year. So who knows? Maybe we will have more seeds than we know what to spit with! Uprooted sunflower seeds!

There is something pretty magical about a green sprout popping up through the ground, still holding onto the shell it came from. There is so much faith and hope involved with planting a garden from seed, dropping dried up organic matter into a pile of dirt and hoping that in time something alive grows from it. It certainly does your heart a world of wonders by having such faith in mother nature.

We have already had an incredibly hot month of May for Alberta. We are working hard on finding solutions to self-irrigating our garden in Delburne, but with a 2 hour drive each way from home in Calgary, we hope that the rain will cooperate with us when we can't make things work! Hopefully we can sort out a timed irrigation system to at least supplement the rain. Zero gravity drip hoses.. those seem hard to find! When we want to use creek and rain water as our irrigation, we tend to stumble into these problems. I think that's part of market gardening though, finding solutions! Fingers crossed!

With another day in the books and one more strongman/farming workout under our belt, we can safely say we are well into the 2018 season with successes already established! Now we wait and complain about the weather like every farmer does, and hope our hard work pays off!

So our next post will hopefully show some growth in the field, hopefully not too many failures to report.. but you live and you learn! Happy growing!

Until next time my friends,

Kait

#irrigation #commuting #seeding #expanding #workout