Now that planting season is here, we are going to start a series of planting tips.

Today’s tip. If you are planning on planting tomatoes, remember they like acidic soil. Adding pine needles, pine sawdust or coffee grounds will lower the soil’s ph and your tomatoes will love it.

tomato

Here are some more photos from Saturday.  Our plant sale continues today so come on out.

Here are some photos from yesterday.  Our sale continues today and Sunday.

Photos from our trip back to Redlands, CA in April.  Of course we had to visit urban farms, farmers markets and talk to all of the gardeners and farmers.

This year we’re going to try something new. In addition to our regular CSA memberships we’re offering five shares in our herb gardens. We’ve spent the last couple of years collecting herbs with various applications and properties for both culinary and medicinal use as well as for fiber dyeing. Shares are $125 for the season (June through October). We’ll have three pick ups scheduled to coincide with a class. Classes are free for our herbal CSA members and will include herbal soapmaking, homemade cough drops and dyeing with natural dyes. For sign up information stop by the farm or give us a call at 719-289-4056.

Here’s a list of the herbs we’ll be offering this year!

Medicinal and Culinary Garden:

garlic, holly hock, red cabbage, calendula, cayenne, echinacea, lavender,  tomato, German chamomile, lemon balm, various mints, mulberry leaf, various basils, rose, rosemary, raspberry leaf, willow bark, sage, dandelion, red clover, feverfew, cumin, coriander, cilantro, caraway, various thymes, dill and stevia.

Dye Garden:

onion skin, red cabbage, California poppy, purple basil, various mints, dandelion, olive, blackberry leaf, lavender, marigold, zinnia.

Varies photos of our fields and trees.

Homemade shutters…an old bed rail for a shelf…industrial sized tomato cans (from our favorite pizza place) painted and filled with petunias…this old place is starting to shape up.

Our pergola is just about done.  This is where our farm store is going to be.  We should be opening up pretty soon.

I love this idea!  My farmer friend Jean shared this with me at a recent knitting group brunch. We fitted six old straw bales together and filled them halfway with leaf mulch, dirt and aged horse manure then stuck 10 Yukon Gold seed potatoes in about five inches down. Once they start growing we’ll keep adding more leaf mulch, dirt and manure. In the fall, once the plants have died down we’ll pull the bales away and harvest the potatoes without having to dig! We added some quilts on top of the bales for extra garden seating, too. I may add some marigolds to give it some color. (Don’t know how they’ll like being covered with mulch. We shall see.)

So my friend Joey and I were at the thrift store the other day and came across a wall of these little cheapy bud vases. Seriously. Like 25 cents each. On their own they seemed tacky, but grouped as they were we found ourselves inspired.  Joey got on Pinterest to see what other people were doing with these. We found some great ideas, but ended up experimenting with what we could find laying around. This is what we came up with. So cute!