A Productive Week

Cover crop seed: the small ones are crimson clover and the big ones are fava beans.

It feels like it has  been a while since I have had some good productive days in the garden, but this week I did. On one day, I weeded and thinned a big bed of carrots. On Friday, Jonas and I prepared some beds for planting and I sowed them with cover crop seed. There are some good reasons why I don’t seem to get so much done lately. One reason is that harvesting and delivering still take two to two and a half days worth of time each week, though that will be changing a bit, as less produce comes out of the garden. Another reason why not so much seems to get done is that the days are getting much shorter. According to one website I found, timeanddate.com, we had just about eleven hours between sunrise and sunset today. Compare that to June, when that time peaked at a bit over fifteen and a half hours. You can get a lot of work done in four and a half hours.

No listing or for sale sign, but we did get a lock box.

There is a third reason why not so much has been getting done in the garden and I think a much more significant one, or at least one that doesn’t happen every year. It has to do with our search for a farm. Since I wrote about looking for a farm last spring, we have made offers on two farms that didn’t work out. With the second one, we were poised to put our house on the market and decided to just go ahead and do it, thinking it would take a long time to sell. But before we could even get a listing or a sign up, we had an offer on our place. The deal is still not set in stone, but it is looking pretty solid now. Once we had that offer, we took our farm search much more seriously and have spent a day or two each week looking for a farm and working on tasks related to selling our house. It has been a bit of a roller coaster ride, finding an interesting place online, seeing it in real life, and then something takes it out of consideration. But, as of today, our offer has been accepted on a third farm that we are both excited about and is the best match to our dream farm yet. We have lots of hoops to jump through in the next few weeks (inspections and soil and water tests, etc.), but we are hopeful this one will work out. I am going to refrain from saying too much more until everything is on track for closing the sale. If it works out, I’ll tell all about it; even more than you’ll want to know!