The fourth week of March/ the first week of April

Due to bad weather, we did not get as much done these weeks as usual.

In Littleton, we got the vegetable garden tilled, to create a better seed bed than was left by the tractor, and we got the fencing around the vegetable garden mostly set up. We planted rhubarb, lemon balm, and peppermint in our herb garden

We planted several hundred beet mix seedlings started in Littleton in the tilled beds in Lakewood. We also mulched some paths and cleared vines, weeds, and sticks from some of the fence lines in Lakewood.

In Littleton, we planted our fruit trees ( 1 meteor cherry, 1 montmorency cherry, 1 honeycrisp apple, 1 Red McIntosh apple, 1 golden delicious apple, 1 sweet 16 apple, 1 summercrisp pear, 1 Lucious pear, 1 Reliance peach, and 2 Italian plums, mostly on semi-dwarf root stocks.) We also spread lots of leaves and pine needles in the vegetable garden as mulch, and planted sugar snap peas, both from seed and as transplants, and Sugar pod 2 snow peas from seed.

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The third week of March

In Littleton this week we rented a trencher and installed a water line and frost proof hydrant. We were donated a bunch of plastic storage units for our tools and supplies. Somebody also donated a picnic table and benches.

We planted flats of Sugar Daddy snap peas, Purple top white globe turnip, Yellow Granex onion, and radishes in the Littleton greenhouse under row cover, using our standard potting mix. We planted some small news paper pots of Sugar snap peas. (The greenhouse is unheated: however, at this time of year the double coverage should keep things from freezing.) We planted about 250 sweet peppers (Marconi Red, Jimmy Nardello, Ampuis, California wonder red, California wonder orange, and a few others) and 100 eggplant (Early black and Black Beauty) in plastic six pack with our standard mix. The peppers and eggplant are now in a heated frame at my house.

We started to pin down landscape fabric in our work area, which will eventually be covered by mulch or gravel.

In Lakewood, we decided that the old compost/ mulch area was unsightly and not very functional. We started the process of tearing down the old bins and forking out the compost materials. (Things did not decompose very well; they seem to have dried out.) We will be building new bins in the shade of the greenhouse, screened from view by a grape and kiwi arbor. We forked over 300 square feet of the beds that we rototilled last year to remove the grass, and re-mulched the paths. We also started gathering and piling all the rocks and concrete chunks on site to build a raised rock flower bed.

Notes from the Work day, April 16th

Our fruit trees have arrived! Three standard pears, five semi-dwarf apples, a standard apricot, a dwarf apricot, a semi-dwarf nectarine, three semi-dwarf plums, and a semi-dwarf peach. We will probably buy some cherries to add to this collection. We are also looking into trees for the wetter areas of the property, possibly including pawpaws, hawthorn, and serviceberry. The trees will be planted at the next work day, Wednesday the 23rd.

At this meeting we planted 200 snap peas in our sheet mulch beds. We will be planting more in future work days. At a member’s house we have started 500 tomato plants.

We finished cutting up a tree felled at the last work day.