Nasty snotty weather all day today. The storms come and go, but they're increasingly wet with warmer days in between, and the snow is disappearing slowly, giving way to mud. See that pile at the front of the greenhouse? That used to come up to the eaves.
With a perfect day for NOT working outside, it was time to get the greenhouse ready for Aimee's plant start business. She generally grows a lot more than we need ourselves, gives away a large number, and sells the rest. We made a few dollars on these last year, which reduced our farm losses a little.
Actually, I just did the income taxes and in the process calculated the farm accounts from receipts of items bought or sold, and I think if I were to put a fair value on all the goods we made for our own consumption, or gave away, we probably showed a profit last year for the first time.
We certainly live well, and thriftily, and our friends and neighbors get to eat a little more homegrown food.
So I spent the morning in the workshop happily enough, with nail-gun and cut-off saw. Once I got these benches made (out of the lumber left over from the five-bar gate), I wanted to see how well the kerosene heater I scavenged from the waste transfer station worked, so I lit it.
The weather was nasty, snow and sleet, temperatures hovering around 35. The heater got the greenhouse up to 60 in a few minutes.
Should be enough to keep the frost of the plant starts in late April/early May.
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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.
The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.
After getting tired of spam comments (up to a dozen or more per day), I required commentators to be Google "registered users". You can write me at mwomersley@unity.edu if you have a serious comment or question and are not a registered user.
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