We've been working fairly hard this past week, getting the place ready for Spring planting. So much has been done, so much more to do. The idea is to try to make money at farming so that we can get on with other projects. And I think we are well on the way.
Our ducks and chickens are giving us about five dozen eggs for sale every week. All of our eggs sell quickly and we deliver them twice a week. At the rate they are selling we will hit our first year egg sales goal by August, then it is all profit till the end of the year. The birds are profitable right now, but we're not going to get rich doing eggs and we're not going to grow the egg business much going forward. The eggs themselves are award winners for taste and the whole egg thing is a good kick off for our entry into the farming business. We are making money enough to pay for gas and we get our personal use eggs for free! A base hit, if you understand the baseball metaphor. But we're getting ready to go into the produce business in a substantial way.
Ann did the back breaking job of planting the new Strawberry field by hand. Twelve double rows, about forty-five feet long, each row about one hundred plants. If things go as expected we might be getting twelve quarts a day from the field in May and triple that in June. Some of the plants are ever-bearing, so it is possible that we'll be harvesting up to twenty quarts a day until late October. This evening brings rain, so the baby strawberries will be up and getting green right away.
While Ann planted, I worked the Market Garden soils and layout. We put out many tons of compost and tilled it into last years inadequate soil, pulling the row making tool we built for the Strawberry Field behind the rototiller. Then we put a fence around the whole garden to keep the animals out. I think our Market Garden looks as a vegetable garden ought to look and should do pretty well this year. We still have a rabbit-gopher-mole problem, but we've got a few new ideas to try this year (most involving chicken wire of some sort).
Once the weather warms a bit the Greenhouse is full of baby plants to go into the garden. And since we have so many things to plant we invested in some professional planting tools. We already had a row seeding tool, but since we are sprouting much of the early seed into planting flats we bought a tube planter which opens a hole for a sprouted plant to drop into. Each plant dropped through the tube takes only a few seconds to plant and there is no stooping down. We also bought some trellis hooks to grow vine crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, and zucchini plants. Using this system takes a bit more pruning, but the hooks suspend the fruit as the vines grow out and keeps the plant growing within it's own space for the entire season. But growing the stuff is only half the job, we still have to sell it.
Ann signed the Farm up for a Farmer's Market at Tuality Hospital. It is two hours a week, very small, and absolutely loaded with the lunch break people. We don't really want to be in the farmers market business because we prefer people come visit us at the Farm. But getting started will take a bit of extra effort, so we will do some off site selling along with the produce stand out front here at the Farm. The Farm Stand will operate on a pay as suggested ,or pay what you will, basis. Part of the Farm Stand is a trailer we are building to sell to the highway traffic on weekends.
Much to do. Much is done. At some point during all of this we still need to build a house. So it looks like we'll be very busy this Summer.
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