Quick Farm Report

It seemed like it would be a good time to share a quick farm report with all of you good people out there - so here it is - a farm report!

The snow on the ground is at that stage where it is nearly impossible to walk anywhere.  You can ALMOST walk on top of some of it, but once you think you might be able to cross an area without falling through, you... um.... fall through, of course.  Most everything is about as uneven as it can get, so you just have to slow down and expect foot travel to take extra time and effort.

The weather has been quite a roller coaster so far this year.  Temps bitterly cold for a couple of days, the quite reasonable for the next.  And, of course, there has been wind - sometimes making the days with a reasonable temperature feel much less reasonable if you are looking to do something outside.

Just yesterday, Tammy and I went out to try and repair the west wall on Valhalla.  Apparently the combination of a derecho in December with some follow-up winds in other directions popped out some of the poly-carbonate panels.   We found the panel for the west wall and after some effort, was able to get it put back up. 

As an aside -  What is it with fixing things on a farm?  It's never as simple as just re-attaching something.  You actually have to take MORE of it apart and then re-assemble it all to fix it.  Ok - that's what it seems like every time we're making repairs in the cold and we have to alternate between having gloves off (so we don't lose the screws, drill bits or other fasteners) and gloves on (so we can avoid frostbite).

In any event, we got the west wall fixed, but we could not locate the panels from the east wall.  Since the upcoming winds are not from the east, we'll just let things run their course for a couple of days and then go replace pieces on that side.  It DOES get a little difficult to hold on to a piece of polycarb when the wind is howling, you know.

The farm plan for 2022 is taking shape, though I wish I could dedicate a solid chunk of time to finalize it all.  Such is the life of a person who is moving to a full-time, off farm job (PAN is asking if I can temporarily increase my time commitment).

We are committed to scaling back on the broiler (meat) chickens in 2022, going from 500 to 100 birds this year.  We will maintain a turkey flock as we have in prior years, but we'll only have one flock of broilers instead of four.  We are still trying to decide how big our hen flock will be after our current flock is retired.

Our vegetable growing plans are a modification of last year's plans - making adjustments after learning where the bottlenecks were going to be with new systems that rely on only the two of us to do the work.  We are hopeful that, with Rob NOT recovering from surgery this Spring, we can get a stronger start out of the gate.

We will be growing larger amounts of onions and broccoli for the Jorgenson Plaza kitchens and we expect to grow out some veggies for seed with Seed Savers again this year.  We were very pleased with the single row of snow peas we planted last year and will try to replicate that - and we hope to do half as well with the early potatoes as we did last year too.

For the time being, we plan to continue offering eggs direct to consumer every other week.  And, if we have excess veggies (I am sure we will), we will offer that as well.  But, the rule will be that we will keep it simple and we will stick with the plan to keep it manageable and to stay healthy and relatively sane.

This farm report has been brought to you by the letters "G", "F" and... "F"

I don't know if it was allowed to re-use a letter, but since it's our blog, we're doing it anyway.  Have a great weekend!