Thanks to Hainses for Truck

First off, I would like to thank Shana and Seth Haines, who I've probably thanked more than once before in the course of this blogs life. This time it is for a toyota truck that is going to rock open heart's world. I've driven it around a few times already and besides the fun I'm anticipating next season, it's definitely going to save the suburu's hide. The tape player works and it can hold lots of totes of food and is manual transmission to boot, it's tan in color, but fear not, as we knew you were, there will be a picture of it soon.

and if I haven't talked about garlic enough yet: Could be cause at quail hill we planted somthing like 500 pounds of it, so our little muched row (yeah for leaf mulch!) seemed pretty easy, and is comprised of about 15 lbs of about five or six seed sources, as I might have already said; some from the grocery store, two from farms 10 miles either north or south of us. Even the stuff I bought at the store was all Vermont. With seed local is just as important as with the veggies themselves, for one simple reason that you know if it grew in this climate once it can do it again. That plus all the other good ones.

Wherein Josh Bites the Pie That Feeds Him

sure, a bit of kvetching post-season: So, I was in a meeting with the other farmers of the intervale and saw there, on the table the 2005 Annual report, which was in brochure form, and they give you the what they take in, and the what goes out, dinero-wise, break down. And I noticed the farmer program is one of the few that doesn't look like it fares well. Oh, well we all know the farming doesn't pay (the bills). Ah, but it does, and it's all the more peculiar when such an org couldn't show it more truthfully. Admin apperently (and as we all know) is where the bones is at. Report-wise, it's confusing (and if you understand it this is what the cmments section of a blog is for), or at least I feel the public should know (tout clair) that we farmers actually pay into those admin revenues. I think $350 a piece, but probably actually more for non-incubator farms. This though is a small part of what irks me about the prominence of the dollar pie chart: Without the farms farming there would be no photos, there would be no grants, probably no healthy city or conservatory nursery since I doubt they would maintain greenhouse and tractors and stuff alone, and certainly not lucrative business of consulting (even one better than admin), based pretty much on the prestige of, you guessed it, the farming program, wherein you tell others how to get said farming integrated into nonprof grant world. Which is not kvetching, but just to say that we may not be the financial burden the pie makes us out to be. Um, it's also not to say that I don't like pie, cause I do.

clean-up

this week has been mostly clean-up and planting the garlic rachel metioned a post or two ago. I have been searching around town for leaves, fairly successfully, since to mulch the garlic which we have planted, 13 lbs, we only need about 20 bags, which new england trees have no problem producing.

also processed some of our saved seed for next year: the gilfeather turnip. someone at the new north end market gave us a bunch (100) of seeds, some still in the pod, so I let them dry a bit on the shelf: put them away yesterday. This particular turnip, I looked up on google, and it says very good for vermont conditions. Looks alot like the rutabega that we grow, I wonder how many very similar looking things people want to differentiate. Still, we shall plant it. That and the Oaxaca tomato which did very well last year.

We had the farmer clean up yesterday which includedgetting ready our cold-frames.

Me too, I'm personally having a cleansing message. Something I like to do after every season, at least for the last two or three years. This year I'm doing at the Aryuvedic center of Vermont in Williston. That's a plug.