Just About Ready to Plant!

Ready to plant!

 I always love this time when the soil is all tilled, smooth and black!  Just waiting to receive seeds and water, to produce little plants and then to grow beautiful food.  Within a week, it will be cut up, tramped down in places and will be full of stakes and rows!  This time is all about potential, what might be!

We were hoping for a very early start, but the rains of late April and early May have lessened that possibility somewhat...we will be getting on earlier than usual but only by about ten days.  What the recent weather has brought is a full dug-out.  After the snow melted our watering pond was only half full, a big worry, but now it's full to overflowing.  The irrigation system itself needs a little work before it will be ready to use, but the soil has ample moisture now and we usually have sufficient rain through the end of May to get things going.

The dug-out full!

Farmer Man got the tilling of the main area finished last evening.  After watching the end of a hockey game, we got out close to dusk to set up the rental plots.  We gave up in the dark, before finishing, but that is getting taken off the 'to-do' list this morning.  The gardeners, with recent sunny days, have been anxious to get started!  This little farm will probably be a beehive of activity this weekend!  All the doggies will be so happy; they love the attention and all the extra pats!  We'll have to corral the chickens soon, or they will happy scratch up and pluck out everybodys' little seedlings!

There is more tilling to be done: the potato field is being moved to an area that was alfalfa/grass last spring.  We've been slowly taking back more and more of the old alfalfa field, for crop rotation and as our business expands.  The soon-to-be potato field was broken up last summer, disked in the Fall, disked again just a few days ago and will now get at least one rototilling to smooth it out.  The area around the dug-out is still a little wet and heavy, so we'll leave that for a while.  We're not in any big hurry: our last frost date is officially June 6th, so we're not in any rush to plant out our started seedlings of tomatoes and peppers.  Seeds and seed potatoes will be safe for planting now, and that will keep us busy enough for a couple of weeks!