seeds | Renovations & Relationships

As we’re quickly learning, there’s always something to do on a farm. Winter typically offers some downtime for a farmer compared to the peak season, but there are plenty of things that can ensure busy days even this time of year. For instance, this past week on the farm included time spent: fixing tractors, chicken-tending, buying supplies for a hoop house, designing said hoop house, and building a pea trellis. And of course, lots of seeding.

Because we’re scaling up considerably from last year’s backyard gardens to a one acre plot (about 40 times bigger, in fact), we need to start a lot more seeds than ever before. How many? Well, we’re still figuring that one out – but take my word for it – it’s a lot. Between selling plant starts at spring markets, and planting an acre for our own production, we’ve got our work cut out for us.

We’re thankful that our new venture at the Local Food Hub grants us space in their heated greenhouse – so our babies get off to a good start. Well, except for a scare one night when temps were well below freezing and one of the heaters stopped working. But that’s a story for another time. For now, please allow me to proverbially jump up and down with excitement because… the babies are sprouting!

Yes, we call our seedlings our babies, and yes they require a lot of care, but we are like most parents who feel that their kids are worth it.

In addition to all the babies in the greenhouse, there are already some in the ground as well: the snow peas are just finally beginning to emerge. As you might have guessed by their name, they don’t mind the snow.

One of the other fun things going on around here is that Mark and I both learned to use the tractor. As if learning the safe operation of an important farm tool were’t exciting enough, we each got to do something productive with it during our training: Mark delivered a load of compost to our home garden site, while I tilled up the area where we will soon plant some early spring crops.

That’s a quick roundup of some of the things we’ve been doing on the farm. As for other goings on, you may have noticed a few changes here on the blog (or you may not have noticed… in which case I’ll just tell you). New things around here include:

a (parenthetically) revised blog name to reflect our new status as on hiatus from home renovations
the new blurb about us on the right column of the homepage
there’s finally a short about us page
and a new page telling our story: from garden to farm

I’ve enjoyed the self-reflection necessary to write the story of how we got here – the shared values, inspired passions, and collaborative decisions that brought us to a farm in Virginia. I’ll admit, I’ve been nostalgic for Vermont on occasion. But then I’ll wake up on this farm on a bright sunny day to see daffodils blooming on snow-soaked soil and my whole being says ahhhh that’s why I’m here.

Don’t forget to check out Cottage View Farm’s website for more photos and stories from the field this season.

Being busy with house stuff, taxes, and work has kept me away from writing recently. I’d like to remedy that with more frequent, though likely shorter, posts about some of the various projects we’re working on.

Right now I’m thinking about one thing: starting more and more seeds. Over the winter we bought seeds from Johnny’s (they had great clearance prices on things that sounded great at the time but now I’m not so sure. What are we going to do with an ounce of “Asian Greens” seeds? What are “Asian Greens” anyway?) and we recently supplemented our seed supply with some from High Mowing, Gardener’s Supply and two local seed swaps.

After a big score of flower seeds at one of the seed swaps, we spent a morning at the dining room table: researching plant varieties and setting up new trays of seeds. As evidenced by the photo, Mark takes seed starting very seriously. We’re excited about the flower seeds because, honestly, we probably wouldn’t have spent money to buy 20 different packets of flower seeds, but the swap allowed us to grab small quantities of a lot of varieties of seeds.

As of now we’ve started over 100 tomato plants (mostly cherries), and probably several hundred more greens (kale, asian greens, mesclun, lettuce), flowers, and onions. But really, that’s not enough.

Outside I’ve planted some frost-tolerant greens and snow peas, which the squirrels keep digging up. I’m planting more today we’ll cover it with a floating row cover or small hoop house structure to keep the squirrels out.

Our babies growing under basement grow lights look like this when using Mark’s new camera to take super vivid photos.

We plan to start more seeds because… why not? Our goal is to grow as much as possible in the limited space we have, and to minimize our need to buy plants (and food) from others. Also, this year I’d like to get better at succession planting – with various spring/summer/fall crops, so that necessitates regular seed starting to stay on top of the growing season.

In amongst last-minute tax preparations, I’m excited to get more seeds growing!