Planting and Logging

Last Sunday we planted Burpee's golden beets, italian dandelion radicchio, palla rossa radicchio, baby green romaine lettuce, hakurei turnips, canary yellow swiss chard, rouge de verone endive, and cascadia snap peas in the greenhouse. Orrin noticed yesterday that some of the turnips have already come up. That's so quick! I've never grown turnips before, so I looked up the germination temperatures, and sure enough, it only takes a few days to germinate if the temperature is around 70F. It's been so warm in the greenhouse lately that we've had to have both doors open to keep it from frying the greens. Once we switch to warm weather crops in there, we'll have the opposite problem, but right now we're just trying to keep it in the 15 – 20C (60 to 70F) range. From the picture you can see how great the greens are doing right now. We're trying to keep them small so they don't get too bitter. As a result, we've been sharing them with family and friends to keep up with the picking.

We are loving have greens every day!

We also noticed a few days ago that a few of the potatoes have sprouted. They've been in there for a while, so it's nice to see them come up.

Orrin and Jake have done a lot of logging in preparation for siding the other building. On Tuesday, they cut quite a few more trees down, and then on Thursday our neighbor Mike came over with his tractor and “the Claw” (as I like to call it) and pulled the logs out of the woods and piled them up near the other building. Orrin and Jake had used Jake's ATV to pull about 100, 10 – 12' log sections out of the woods in 4 or 5 days over the last month or so, and Mike pulled 37 logs out and had them piled with his tractor within 2 hours. Ah yes, the benefits of heavy machinery. We think we have around 4000 board ft of wood, once it gets milled (hopefully in the next week or so). That should be enough to side the house and have extra to build the wood shed. We'll need wood for a barn, too, but first things first.

This is most of the cut logs.

Here's Mike with "The Claw" and the rest of the logs.