Thoughts on a Monday morning

Whew...I think I'm almost back to my normal self!  It only took about a month and two days since little miss was born to feel that way, but I'm okay with that.  Pregnancy is hard on a body and giving birth is even harder!

Back to the farm.  I was pretty much absent the last couple months of my pregnancy from the farm details, but I'm getting back into the fold.  One project this year will be mostly under my direction is the market garden.  We have almost an acre of land that had previously been used as a garden and a portion had planted to asparagus.  The asparagus needs some TLC, but it was pretty plentiful last year.  My goal this year is to attend one, maybe two farmer's market and sell our produce and meat.  I'm pretty excited about this because I love growing veggies and last year I really slacked off.

This will be a challenge for me in a couple of different ways.  Number one, I've only ever grown a home garden.  Sizing up will bring some interesting challenges.  Increasing the organic matter and quality of soil will be one of my biggest projects.  The area has been neglected for a couple years and is pretty weedy.  It was easy in town to add organic matter.  Go to the nearest home store and buy a bag of compost and BAM!  Instant soil....  That will be neither feasible money and time wise.  I'm going to have to do it the old fashioned way by building it up through crop rotation and green manures.

The second challenge for me is the actual selling, packing and marketing of the produce.  I will hopefully be attending the Growing Farmers workshop at Community Crops in Lincoln.  I've looked over the classes and every single question I had thought of as a potential barrier for selling at market is covered in this 8 week class.  Hopefully it's not full and I can still get in, because I think this will help me immensely.  Jon and I kinda do things backwards on the farm sometimes.  We jump in head first and then figure out what we are doing after we've started the project.  For some people that wouldn't work, but we always manage to squeak by with little to no experience in this farming adventure.  I'm looking forward to getting some good training for experienced market gardeners instead of having to trial and error everything. 

I feel like I'm a little behind already and that I should be starting my market garden planning, but as you can see I've been a little preoccupied.  When is it too soon to start her pulling weeds...six months old? Just kidding!