The AIF team has enjoyed an unprecedented two weeks in a row of great weather for outdoor work. While we know the business end of the farm is important, we really live to be outside, working in our fields and hoop house. This relative warmth and break in the seemingly endless rain gave us the opportunity to get out there and, low and behold, actually finish a project!
Teamwork makes moving the compost piles easy-peasy…or at least faster and more fun!
Our team has been working to get beds ready for planting. Our top field is all raised beds, many of which were simply falling apart after serving us well for 6 or so years. A kind supporter of our little farm built us some new beds to replace our old ones and we have been hard at work to fill those up and get them ready for our little seedlings. We spent the last two Fridays adding delicious compost to those spaces. We had lined most of them with cardboard in the early winter. This helps to decrease the weed pressure from below and encourages all those good little worms and microbes in the soil to come on up and take a bite. Adding the layer of rich compost on top will encourage even more of that and give our little plants the best nutrition for growth.
We are so grateful to have a partnership with Hoffman Composting. If you aren’t familiar with this JC local company, please check them out. Joe is a wealth of knowledge and provides an incredible service to our area. In addition to the quality product he provides, we are fortunate to be a part of two parts of this cycle of composting- from the input to the output! Our school cafeteria collects food scraps (as well as now metal scraps) and Joe picks these up from us each week. He does the hard work of turning this “waste” into rich compost material that we then turn back into our land. We spread 8 scoops of this good stuff with out most recent efforts and have plenty to go!
A thank you to those who have reached out to help us get out fields ready for planting. We have a lot of work to be done and we are grateful for your willingness to help. More info coming soon about that so be sure to use the contact tab and shoot as an email with your contact info!
Thanks for following along, friends. We are getting so close to having flowers to share with you and simply can’t wait!
And finally, I swear I am going to work on being more diligent with updating the blog (made it two weeks in row, that means it is a habit, right) and the socials. Heavens, it isn’t like I am not on there anyway and should just post…shaking off the blah of a pandemic year/winter and getting back into the game!