Uprooted 2019 has Begun!

The first weekend at the farm has been tucked away under our belts and we feel pretty good about it! Even though Ben usually looks this happy, he's even happier being able to play on his tractor in the sunshine!

It's officially our third season into the dream that is Uprooted Farm.. If you've been tagging along for the past two seasons to see our struggles and triumphs, thank you friend, for your support! If you're just checking our story out now, that's excellent, welcome to the crazy story that is Uprooted.

This season we are tackling an expansion of epic proportions.. We are almost doubling our garden plot from last season! This was made possible by covering the section with a tarp to get it started all last season, then disc-ing with Ben's new disc for the tractor. It still required some roto-tilling and raking up by hand, but it made a big difference in the amount of effort required to create new beds for an exciting addition to the plot. This will likely be the season we can expand enough to supply a much larger audience, and we are pretty excited about it!

So we had our first weekend at the farm and was able to get a good chunk of the preparation for the season completed. We intend on heading up next weekend for a day of seeding to get our first row of beets, carrots and radishes in, and plant our seed potatoes, sunflowers, corn and some other fun experiments for the season. We were happily greeted by some green sprouts on our garlic bed that was planted in the fall, as well as some green leaves of all three of our rhubarb transplants, our adorable little strawberry plant and all 4 of our haskap bushes covered with green! Very happy to report all of our transplants from the fall made it through the winter and has given us so much promise for the perennials of our garden! It gives us an air of establishment that we haven't had before at the farm. Work that continues to reap rewards.. now that's a lovely feeling.

This season marks a new challenge for us, we also have the addition of haying about 40 acres of the land in addition to the market garden, so our weekends will be very full and we look forward to it! This is a picture of the before with our new wheel hoe that worked like a charm on our beds from last season, as well as the tarps covering the new beds that we formed (the straw is our garlic bed):

And this was what it looked like after a long day on the job, 8 formed beds, untarped new portion of the plot:

We still have a bit more bed prep left to do on our new plot section before we seed next weekend, but we are keeping up with our schedule and hope the weather will cooperate. It has been a rollercoaster of a May, with very warm days and also snow (Classic Alberta), so we are hoping the weekends are nice enough that we can pull off a seamless seeding and not have to worry too much.

So I do intend on updating you on our seeding weekend and hopefully another successful day on the farm, as we will have learned something by then, I'm sure. Please note, I am sore.. but its not a sore like I felt two years ago, when I didn't know I had the muscles I do.. It's discovering that we have it in ourselves to be whatever we decide, and it's an amazing feeling.

So I'll leave you with the word of gumption. I hope you all have the gumption to tackle what ever you set your mind on this summer, and if it looks too large to swallow.. just start biting at it, and you'll get there bit by bit!

Until next time my friends,

Kait