Well, after such a beautiful opening day at Cherry Street, rain is in the forecast for this weekend. While the rain is much needed at the farm, it's not quite as welcome at the market. Hopefully, the bulk of rain comes Friday night and gives us a few decent hours of weather Saturday morning or the joke will be on us, and nothing is quite as unfunny as loading, unloading, and standing in a pouring rain.
On the vegetable front, the warm weather really has everything looking good that hasn't been devoured by mice, or raccoons, or crows, or deer, or... man, the varmits are really out in full force this year. I just hope some of the neighbors are planting some field corn to lure them away. We finished putting all the tomato plants in their cages, and got a start on setting the rebar posts so we can stake and weave the pepper plants.
Desperate times require desperate measures, so we resorted to starting the squash and cucumber seed in flats and then transplanting them as soon as they break soil, all in an effort to keep them from being main course in a seed feeding orgy of critters at the farm.
We'll have Simpson leaf, Red Rosie romaine, and Troutback romaine lettuce at the market Saturday, as well as radishes and possibly a few turnips. Next week we might have some baby zuccini, as they're about an inch long already. Hopefully in two weeks we'll have some Georgia collard greens (can you say cornbread?) and green and red cabbage. I took a snap of the cabbage that's really taking off:
On the pigeration front, brat dawgs and hot dawgs will be served up Saturday, so come get a treat before they run out. We got Perk and Twiggy moved to their farrowing pasture and should get more piglets on the ground by mid week. I hauled a new feeder down from Stillwater Milling to put in with Geez, Myfoot, and their pigs who have really started chowing on solid feed. The warm weather has the pigs heading for the wallows, as nothing seems so wonderful to a pig as mud, mud, glorious mud! We have the coop delivery this week, as well as picking up meat from the butcher and hauling four more to the butcher on Monday. I got a snap of Twigs and Perk in full mud attire:
Thanks for reading, and stop by and see us Saturday!
Pork & Greens
p.s. Here's a photo of one of our POW's captured this week. He wouldn't cooperate during interrogation about the location of the raccoon's HQ (kept playing possum) so we were forced to use waterboarding techniques. (He actually liked that so we just turned him loose!) 