Getting ready for the festival

The Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival is just two weeks away, so things are in high gear here at the farm. Greg spent yesterday in the greenhouse transplanting seedlings with the radio going full blast -- blues and zydeco music on WPFW. Since we have had so many rainy days this spring, we are hoping for two weeks of sunny weather to really get the plants jumping!

My job is to dye yarn, which has been a pleasure this year. At the old farm, I had to use the kitchen stove, which meant clearing everything out of the kitchen on dyeing days. One of the many great things about the new farm is that prior owners had converted the lower level of the bank barn to a garage, complete with a hot water heater and kitchen sink. There is even plumbing for a washing machine. Instant dye kitchen!

Photo of the bank barn taken last summer. Future plans include a fiber studio and farm stand, but right now it houses my dye kitchen. The garden plot on the right has been replaced by the greenhouse.


Greenhouse and house as seen from the bank barn on a rainy spring day.

My dye kitchen, functional but still a work in progress.

It's so nice to have a place for all of my dyeing supplies, instead of dragging them out from a back bedroom each time I want to dye!

For now, I am using a 1500-watt electric hot plate as a heat source.

Yarn drys in the early morning sunshine on the side porch of the house. The antique laundry rack came from a shop in Frederick.

That's all for now. I have a couple of hours before we head off for Easter dinner with my family, so I think I will work on labels for the yarn.

Stop by and see us May 7 & 8th at the festival. Turn left just past the information tent and look for our booth on the left.

Greenhouse Update

This was a strange year in the greenhouse. The first planting of basil seedlings developed some form of root rot and died. The germination on peppers was spotty, and the ones that did come up and got transplanted didn't grow, just stayed the same size. Too many cloudy and cool days in April, I guess. Then Greg spotted aphids on some of the peppers. Uh oh, somehow, we had forgotten to order the ladybugs which we usually release in the greenhouse as a preventative measure (ladybugs love to dine on aphids). Out came the insecticidal soap, which helped with the aphids, but scorched some of the plants (Greg sprayed them on one of the rare sunny days we had) and I hopped on the internet to place an emergency order for ladybugs. Good thing the tomatoes were fairly trouble free!

Our big plant-selling event each year is the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival on the first weekend in May. Our sales during that single weekend generally equal our entire farmers’ market season. We have repeat customers that have been buying plants from us for eight or nine years. We usually bring four truckloads of plants to the Festival; this year we only took two and for the first time did not have any peppers or basil. Add to that a damp weekend (off and on showers on Saturday and steady rain for most of the day Sunday) and it seemed to be a recipe for disaster.

In the end, although our sales were down, things could have been worse. The threat of rain on Saturday did not hold back the crowd at all; I heard that at one point they even had to close the parking lot of the Howard County Fairgrounds because it was full! We sold just about every plant we took to the Festival and came home with a total of four trays of plants. Sunday sales were slow, but that could have been because there really wasn’t much left by then as much as because of the weather.

Now that we’ve had a couple more weeks of warm weather, the peppers are finally looking great! The second planting of basil is coming along, and we’ve transplanted more tomatoes. We’ll be taking a truckload of plants to the 2nd Annual Maryland Heartland Sustainable Living Fair next weekend, Saturday, May 23 2009 from 9 am - 5 pm at the Carroll County Farm Museum in Westminster, Maryland (http://www.sustainablelivingmd.org/). Come join us if you are in the market for some sustainably grown plants for your garden!

Kris

Gearing Up For Spring

Quiet time on the farm is over. After the relatively laid back days of December and early January, with only the routine chores of feeding the animals (apart from shopping for a new farm and putting this one on the market, but that's a story for another day), it's time to look ahead towards spring. The first thing on the agenda is the annual seed order, which we traditionally do on the Martin Luther King holiday, since Kris has that day off from work. This year, we will be starting the following plants in the greenhouse: 14 varieties of slicing tomatoes, 7 varieties of plum tomatoes, 9 varieties of cherry tomatoes, 18 varieties of hot peppers, 12 varieties of sweet peppers in assorted sizes, shapes and colors, 9 varieties of eggplant and 8 types of basil. As usual, we will be doing lots of heirloom varieties. In addition to all of the usual suspects from past years, we have added two new ones this year -- Turkish Orange eggplant and Scotch Bonnet peppers -- based on customer requests. Greg will be starting the first seeds in mid-February, and the plants will be ready to sell just in time for the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival the first full weekend in May.