Flower Ladder

Last September, Milan and I took a trip to Washington to visit my sister and while we were there visited a flower farm that I fell in love with.  On a second trip to Jane's farm, Jane passed along a fantastic idea for displaying flower bouquets at the farmers market...on a ladder.

It just so happens that I come from a family that rarely gets rid of anything.  So it was no surprise that the answer was yes when I asked my dad if he had an old stepladder that he wasn't using.  The ladder made it to the farm in the back of a boat last fall and there it sat until I had procrastinated long enough to be in a hurry to get it fixed up.

It started about about 8 feet tall.  Much too tall to fit under my tent at the market and much to heavy for me to carry just about anywhere.  So Robert cut two feet off of it.

And then Mary, Milan and I painted it...blue.  The same blue as my bathroom.  We used paint from when we built our house eight years ago.

Then we set a few tulips in front of it and decided we really liked it.

So Robert helped attach the vases with self-tapping screws and I finished it with a few butterflies.

The finished product...

I'm hoping to fill it full of tulips at the Hillcrest market this weekend.  More pictures to come!

Friday Flowers & Easter Eggs

Pretty things headed to the Hillcrest Farmers Market tomorrow morning!

Critters are Taking Over

Everywhere I turn there's a critter.  Or evidence of one.

Sleeping on a pile of row cover in the greenhouse...

Sleeping on row cover in the caterpillar tunnel...

Laying eggs in the dog's stall...(are you kidding?  This chicken is coming into the barn through the dog door.)

And this.  This is what a hoofprint looks like in a bed of kale after a horse walks through it.

They might be taking over the farm.

Growing, growing, growing

A few warm days over the last week helped everything take off around the farm.  A little taste of what's growing in the greenhouse and in the field...

The first tulip blushed in yesterday's rain.

And today's sunshine reminded me why I stuck with Banja Lukes despite a disappointing crop last year.

Sugar snap peas,

spring kale,

red and green leaf lettuce,

a second round of spinach in the tunnel waiting to go into the field,

three crooked beds of broccoli,

and sweet candy onions.

A few of my favorites in the greenhouse...tomato seedlings,

molucella laevis, what?? (bells of ireland),

antirrhinum majus (snapdragon), 

and my favorite seedlings this year...any guess on this one?

This Week

This week has been crazy.  Beautiful weather causing me to pace up and down next to wet fields and nighttime temperatures just low enough to make me hesitant to move the tomato seedlings out of the house for another few days had me climbing up the walls.  So much to do and all of it dependent on forces beyond my control and likely to all need to be done at the same time.

The chickens got one last bucket of fall kale when it was finally dry enough for me to get a tractor and tiller in the ground.

Robert finished putting plastic on the end walls of the greenhouse.  He actually used the plastic panels from the broken greenhouse to build the end walls and I think it looks fantastic.

The tulips are steadily growing and so far not blooming.  After last year's super early, super short tulips, I'm hoping this crop makes up for last year.

The sugar snap peas finally poked through the ground early this week, just when I was about to give up on them and they have definitely liked this week's warmer weather.

Mary and I finished getting the pea trellis ready early in the week while we were waiting on dry ground and warmer weather.

Finally, today.  We spent the better part of the day playing with the bed raiser/mulch layer.  Robert took the afternoon off to help Mary and I figure it out and we all learned a lot from it.  

Thankfully, no one was injured and we didn't kill each other.  While our new beds aren't as pretty as I'm confident future beds will be, they are raised and we did get one bed planted before it got dark. 

And apparently my rows aren't any straighter in a bed of plastic than they have ever been.  That's okay though, I get to plant tomorrow!