SCRAPPY.
It's impossible to attempt an accurate account of everything we've done in the past few days, because now that the season is here, we're never not doing something new. Mulching, planting, soil-block making, constructing, fencing––the tasks add up quickly. That's how farming goes, though. It's a diverse collection of thousands of different projects in hopes that all our hard work, sweat, tears and yes, occasionally blood, coalesce in bushels of good, healthy food. UPS should use farming as an example of logistics instead of that horrible Christian Laetner shot. Luck is the opposite of logistics, UPS.Anywho, our young tomato seedlings were getting large enough to need bigger digs, but the 4" soil block makers are not cheap, begging us to construct our own. The results took the form of a small plastic pot, a 2"/2" piece of wood and a screw––all scrapped (thus free!). Soil-block making is a little like building a sand castle where you stuff the plastic container with soil and dump it out as an identical mold. To be perfectly honest with you, however, we were both a little surprised at how well our homemade version of a soil-block maker actually worked. Having got our first round of tomatoes re-potted, we were now faced with the task of finding room for them––they were four inches taller, four inches wider and there were twenty-seven of them––that's not including the heirlooms we've yet to do. It eventually became apparent we needed to construct another box. With our new collection of scrapped windows and scrapped wood, we endeavored to build something a little deeper than the original box, and it would be hard now to hide my pride for the resulting structure!––even if it is a little wonky, we adore it.But that only grazes the surface of our activity. Luckily, they say pictures are worth a thousand words so I'll just let the pictures tell you about our mulching, our garden and the new reel mower (non-electric) I talked Hannah into! Take it away, pictures...- Jesse.
