The No-Till Option... Pretty cool

Wow, I had a friend from the Mt. Vernon extension office come out and take a look at my plot. During our conversation he mentioned an interesting method for starting some of the rows I need to direct seed.

The idea was about using newspaper and compost to suppress weeds and germinate your seeds. I think I might need to try this on few rows, just to see how it goes... Lazy man's gardening!

Here is a video I found at Audubon Magazine.

Peppers and tomatoes are coming along nicely

So my peppers and tomatoes are growing nicely. In fact, I have a lot more tomato plants than I anticipated. I think I had something like a 95% germination rate for my Black Krim, Brandywine, Legends and Chadwick tomatoes. The peppers haven't germinated that effectively, except for my poblano peppers. These are growing like gang-busters so far.



Right now, I have them under three 150watt CFLs, and running on a 24/hour cycle. Growth looks good. At first I was getting a lot of spindly little starts, especially outta my kale and broccoli till up'd the light. The little guys were struggling to reach the light. Now, it is nearly on top of them.

Anyway, with the germination rate on all my other peppers, I think it is time to start more seedlings! But that is ok, this next planting will be a few weeks behind so I can have a tapered harvest for the peppers.

Sunday Feasts on Ebey

So now that we are living back on the Westside of the mountains Crystal has been able to see her family more often, including her brother and his family. They are big into food too, how it is grown, where it is grown and of course how it tastes. So last Sunday we inaugurated a weekly get together; I guess you'd say it was more like throw-down with cooking, eating, and drinking.

Whenever I think about the whole catering idea, I think about working with them. The food was incredible and I think together we could knock the socks off of most people.

Each of us had a couple of dishes we were meant to prepare. For their part, they tackled a baby artichoke and serrano ham dish, along with garlic shrimp in lemon aioli. I put out some roasted veggies with fresh herbs and beef skewers that had marinated in a guajillo chile sauce I'd made earlier that morning. What made all that much better was the food was cooked on a grill with alder we collected from the property.

Wow, it was crazy eats!

I look forward to more of these events, especially once we start harvesting something. It was very interesting to think nearly 80% of all the food we ate was stuff that I will be growing/producing on our farm this year. And that is what it's about, growing good food and eating good food!