June 15, 2013 Wildfire Nearby & Fairy Rabbit Boats

You may have seen on the news, but we have had more wildfire excitement then we wanted this week. The Royal Gorge Wildfire was nearby, and this is the view of the first afternoon from standing between our greenhouses and the driveway. Thankfully, the fire is well on its way to being fully contained now and we are grateful!

Despite being too smokey, and checking the news reports frequently, life goes on and things must get accomplished. Wholesale orders went out mostly on schedule, although the mountain delivery had to be re-arranged from Wednesday to Friday because Hwy 50 was closed due to the wildfire. Spring cleaning, well, summer cleaning, was in the works for the house, and the gardens continue to be in their overhaul mode.

All week I have been weeding and planting in the gardens in-between work and the housecleaning project. A lot of good progress has been accomplished, but there is still a  lot to be done. These carts  full of plants have been going back and forth between the greenhouses and the  gardens. It’s a work in progress.

Next week our Nebraska family will be visiting for the week and that means we will have youngsters on the farm starting next Sunday. It was time to whip the fairy garden into shape so that it will be ready to receive young visitors, who may find a bit of time to play in the fairy garden. And look who has shown up just in time to greet the young ones….three fairy rabbit boats and a fairy lake! Their boats are made of walnut shells. Pretty sweet.

Next Saturday, June 22nd, I will be speaking at Tagawa’s Herb Fest event. It will be a workshop that is great fun…filled with lots of information and a good deal of giggle I expect too. What is the title…Herbal Aphrodisiacs. If you can join us, the workshop starts at 10:00 am. See the classes and events page of this blog for more information.

Next Friday brings the Summer Solstice…the longest day of the year and a day of high summer. Take some time this week and plan how you will celebrate the changing of the seasons. Something special is always in order on these special days of the year.  I will be lighting a candle, whose flame and wisp of smoke that will carry my prayers of gratitude. I have a great deal to be grateful for, especially this week!

Solstice Blessings, Tammi

June 9, 2013 Poppies, Rosa rugosa & Black Currants

The oriental poppies in the garden are stunning right now…full of color and cheerful attitude! Poppies are definitely one of my most favorite flowers and I have all different types growing in the gardens here. These oriental poppies won’t be blooming all that long, but while they are they are amazing.

 

This weekend has been a weekend of part work and part catch up around here. Yesterday I spent many (with a capital M) hours cleaning my kitchen, which has gotten only the necessary attention over the past four months. There were cob webs and a layer of dust from heating with a woodstove in winter, so it needed some TLC and now it looks great. My goal is to work my way through the house, as each room is in a similar state to the kitchen.

The gardens are also in bad need of attention. Our personal gardens never get any attention or planting done until June after our Open Farm Days and Farm Stand close for the season. I started the process of weeding for a few hours here and there as time allows from the still very busy greenhouse work schedule. In addition, I planted a pollinator wildlife garden along the north hedgerow of our house. This garden was extended last fall with a new planting of currants and iris, so now I’ve added a lot of different perennials to attract pollinators. There are hollyhocks, chocolate flower, poppies (of course), Echinacea paradoxa, and a few other things in the mix. It should be a very beautiful addition to the hedgerow, which has been just bushes of various kinds and a few trees.

Today I took a bit of time to plant 2 Rosa rugosa bushes and 2 black currant bushes in the White Rabbit Garden. Once this garden is weeded, if I can ever get time to complete that task, I will plant in some more fairy garden perennial plants too. I’ve also sown a whole bunch of California Poppies which will be scattered around in the garden. The garden has been under renovation for the past year, as Lizz and I have attempted to get a grass problem back under control. That renovation meant that many of the pre-existing perennials were removed to get the grass rhizomes out of the ground around their roots, so now there is a lot of re-planting work that needs to happen. My nature is to just plant and have it all done Right Now, but I’m trying to tame that monster and take my time this time, so that I plant things I really want in the garden, rather than planting just for the sake of having the space filled with color. It means the process will take a lot more time, but in the end I know I will be a lot happier with the way the garden turns out.

We have been having a great time watching all the baby wildlife on the farm. There are lots of baby birds learning to fly now and we have a family of baby squirrels that think the only thing they have to do in life is romp and play. They are precious to watch. Many of the does are showing signs that their pregnancies will soon be coming to an end in the birth of sweet fawns, and both Chris and I look forward to watching those little ones as they move on this farm land.

Other news is that our daughter, M’lissa, celebrated her 30th year birthday this week. She is busy as a Park Ranger in Mesa Verde and I think she is constantly amazed by the grandur in the nature of that place. Today she called to say she was spending her days off camping. What fun and I caught myself wishing that I was camping too. Instead, Chris and I will have an evening walk at Oil Well Flats (BLM land near our farm) and it will be good medicine for the spirit and the body I have no doubt.

June 2, 2013 Plain Old Everyday

  Meet Jade. She is the winner of this year’s Open Farm Days raffle gnome fairy garden planter. When I called her to tell her she had won, she was screeching with  delight.

Our Open Farm Days and Farm Stand plant sale are finished for 2013. The Farm Stand is empty now and all the leftover inventory has been integrated into the wholesale inventory.  More than half of our greenhouses stand empty now as the spring busy season continues. We still have plenty of good plants available for our wholesale customers though.

Today was the first day since the end of February that I was able to have part of the day off. Wow! That feels pretty incredible! So, I spent it planting my own veggies in the food garden and getting the raspberry bed weeded. I’m hoping to get some weeding done tonight in the White Rabbit garden.

The other event today is putting a fence back in place around our south bird garden to keep the deer from raiding the saucer bird feeders that sit close to the ground for the ground feeding song birds and quail. The deer have become too active in raiding those low feeders so we are putting a stop to it. This is a small area, and one of many unfenced bird gardens on the farm, but those other gardens are not problematic like this one has become.  This garden has just become too much of interest to the deer. The other bird gardens have pole feeders up high enough that the deer are not interested, but this garden is different in that it has the low feeders for the ground birds like the quail, thrashers, chickadees, and so on.

Speaking of which, Chris is back from the hardware store and I’m supposed to be helping him build that deer fence, so I had best sign off for this time and get back to work.

Cheers!

May 24, 2013 Last Open Farm Weekend for 2013

The past couple of weeks have been super busy here with wholesale customers ordering big orders each week. This photo reflects a typical Monday in May when orders are pulled and put everywhere, including clogging the aisles, waiting for their turn to be cleaned and labeled by Beki, Carol and Lizz. When they are beautiful and ready to be delivered to our customers they are staged on racks in a holding area until their delivery day later in the week. We’ve been processing more than 500 flats each week for the past two weeks…which is a LOT and I’ve moved every single flat personally numerous times! My body and mind is very tired and in deep gratitude for the business.

This Saturday and Sunday are the final days of our Open Farm Days and Farm Stand Plant Sale for 2013. We will open our farm to the public for these last two days before closing to the public and going back to being strictly wholesale. We still have plenty of great plants for sale if you are needing some good choices for your garden landscape. Come visit between 9am and 4pm this Saturday and Sunday and we hope you will do a final bit of shopping while you are visiting the farm.

I will be teaching 4 workshops this weekend, free workshops on all kinds of herbal topics. Saturday morning there will be a demo workshop on making tinctures, vinegars, teas and infusions. Saturday afternoon will be a harvesting and storing your herbs workshop. On Sunday morning I will be giving a workshop on growing and using culinary herbs, and in the afternoon on Sunday the final workshop will be choosing herbs for a moonlit herb garden. This workshop will be about choosing beautiful herbs that reflect nicely in the garden in the moonlight, of which we have a full moon right now, so it should be perfect timing to plant these types of herbs in your garden. Workshops are held at 10 am and 1:30 pm each day.

On Saturday at noon we will be raffling off the Gnome Garden planter to some lucky person who purchased a raffle ticket over the course of the Open Farm Days. There is still time until noon on Saturday to stop by and buy a raffle ticket for $1.00 each if you would like to enter into the drawing. The winner must pick up their Gnome Garden by 4 pm on Sunday afternoon or they will forfeit their prize to the backup winner. Money generated by the raffle will be used to purchase fresh produce for our local food bank, so this event is not only fun, but also serves the community in a positive way.

The weather has settled now into warm night temperatures, so I brought out all my citrus trees from the greenhouse, many loaded with ripening fruits, to the steps of the back porch. This summer they will live there, adoring our gathering porch space, and happily growing until it is time to be taken back indoors in autumn before the first hard frost occurs. There are limes, lemons, tangerines, kumquiats, and pomegranates.

Chris and Elyse, our field crew team for the summer, have been planting field starts and pulling weeds from the perennial seed crop beds. There are still a lot of crops to be planted, but they are off to a great start and their help is very much appreciated. My Chris has been driving nearly every day making deliveries to wholesale customers all over Colorado and northern New Mexico, so he is especially appreciative of these folk’s help since it is hard for him to get a lot of field time in right now.

Another very big event this week is the arrival of the farm’s and Lizz’s honeybees. This is our bee yard waiting for the bees to arrive on Tuesday. The bees had a bit of a challenge getting here though, because UPS sent them to the wrong location and then had to re-route them back to Canon City. Instead of arriving by noon on Tuesday, Lizz and I picked them up Tuesday evening at the local UPS station and brought them here to their new home.

We received 3 colonies in all and this is how they are shipped. Lizz removed the packing strips and then removed the queen in her own traveling box and installed her into each new hive.

Once the queen bee is in the hive, Lizz pours (literally) the rest of the colony of bees into the hive.

There are two different styles of hives in the bee yard. Lizz is housing her colony of bees in a top bar hive she built. This is looking directly into this hive after the bees were poured in. You can see the sugar water in jars inside the hive to feed the bees until they begin to establish themselves in their new home and start to forage for nectar, pollen and resins out in nature. Lizz and Chris are experimenting with two different approaches to feeding the bees. The farm colonies of bees are eating honey syrup and Lizz’s colony is eating sugar syrup. Our two mentors have advised us to use different choices, so Lizz is trying both choices to see if there ends up being any noticeable difference between the colonies. Here they are on Thursday re-filling the feeders.

Today is our annual organic inspection to renew our USDA organic certification. It takes the better part of the day to get through the inspection process, so today is dedicated to that event and not a lot of other farm work will take place. We have a new inspector this year, which we expect will add time to the already long inspection process as this inspector has not visited our farm before and has no background as a starting point. It is a difficult time to have our inspection when we are so busy filling wholesale orders, but it must be done and is very important for us.

Wednesday was also the last day of work for our seasonal greenhouse crew. Most of the planting for the season is finished, excepting maintenance planting which goes on year round, and with the end of May the 500 flat week orders will start to get a bit smaller (hopefully not too quickly:)). Beki and Carol and Lizz have worked super hard, above and beyond the call of duty. They are exhausted, as are we all this time of year. We send Carol and Beki back to their normal lives and will look forward to asking them to return for the spring season next year when their help will very much be needed. Being shorthanded for a few weeks will make life interesting for Lizz, Chris and I to get all the greenhouse work done each week, and Doug will be helping out on weekends, but it is a transition we make each May and it is time not only due to the work load, but for the farm budget. Thank you Carol and Beki!!

So, I’ll close this very long post and get out to the greenhouses early this morning so that I can finish my watering before the inspector arrives at 9 am. Please do come and visit us this weekend for our last Open Farm Days. You can even “sit a spell” on the porch while your here and enjoy the citrus trees.

With Green Thoughts,

Tammi

May 8, 2013 We’re on a Wild Teacup Ride!

This cow skull hangs above the door of our little garden house and was a gift nearly 19 years ago. It has become the home of little birds that nest in it each spring. The eye socket appears to be the front door.

Each day this week we have loaded the delivery trailer with flats of plants and off Chris goes on a day of driving to deliver orders to our wholesale customers. Each day in a different direction. Today he took flats of vegetables to Denver Botanic Gardens for their spring May Mother’s Day plant sale that begins tomorrow, along with orders delivered to several other customers. Last Monday he drove to and back to Alburquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Tuesday was a trip to Denver customers and tomorrow he will return to Colorado Springs, Denver and Longmont and end in Ft Collins, then back home again in Canon City. He is putting a lot of car seat time in to get all these beautiful plants delivered personally for us.

The geese couple have been hanging around in the pond this past week. They show up each spring about this time and every time they arrive I hope they will nest here. So far they visit for a couple of weeks and move on. We’ll see what happens this year, but I expect it will be the same.

This time of the year is definitely a wild teacup ride of chaos and busy activity. We have an awesome farm crew this year that helps to make it all possible. In truth, we couldn’t even begin to accomplish all that we do without these fantastic people working with us! Thank you to each one of you…Carol, Beki, Lizz, Chris, Elyse and Doug. In two weeks the crew will get smaller as our greenhouse planting season is nearly over. The field crew really only got started last week with the cold spring putting causing a slower start than normal, and they will be here throughout the summer months. Lizz and Doug will be helping on-going. It is a great group.

In the middle of it all, Chris and I try to stay focused and remember to be mindful of the daily pieces of a normal life. That is challenging when the clean laundry must just collect in a pile un-folded, the dishes barely getting done each day, and Chris having to be on the road for many long hours each and every day. Still, every other day we find a little tiny bit of time to visit with Shrek, our neighbor dog. He seems to know when it is a play day and waits for us at his fence until he sees that we are walking over to get him. Then we all three head to the pasture with the Frisbee and take a 20 minute break to just play. It feels good to all of us!!

This weekend is our third Open Farm Days weekend. We will have all the plant varieties out in the Farm Stand. There will be a workshop Saturday morning on growing your own food to fill your pantry all year long with James. Brian will be teaching basic beekeeping on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday morning I will be giving a talk on growing and using medicinal herbs. Then Sunday afternoon Jerry will be back to talk some more about perennial gardening in an arid climate and which plants make excellent choices for your garden. Please join us if you can. It’s mother’s day weekend and there are plenty of beautiful flowers and container veggie gardens for sale in our Farm Stand to choose as a gift for your mom, wife or grandmother to tell them you love them.

Oh, and Cindi, Happy Birthday and I love you!!

All for now. With Green Thoughts,

Tammi

May 1, 2013 Happy May Day!

We’re celebrating May Day with a bit of spring moisture. Not too much yet, but it’s still snowing, so hopefully by morning it will add up to some measureable moisture.

Last week we had a snow event too and received about 3″ of snow. We’ve mostly been missed by the snow events so far this year, so it has been a  real gift to actually see things wet and even a bit of mud to deal with. Who would think I’d be happy to see mud tracking into my house!

Our friends, Amy and Guy who own Shortgrass in Erie, CO posted last week that they received 19″ of snow…wow! That is much needed moisture for them too, but since they opened their garden center on the 14th of April it definitely put a crimp in business. I’m not sure how they feel about it, but even though the cold spells have made doing business extra tricky, we are still happy to see the moisture .

The farm crew is tidying up the Farm Stand in preparation for our 2nd Open Farm Days weekend this weekend. We had a really good opening weekend with a lot of farm visitors, and everyone having a good time.

Mom and Dad were here all weekend helping out, and in truth, I’m not sure how we would manage without them and their helping hands!

On Sunday we had a fairy miniature garden workshop and it was well attended and we had a great time. This is our gnome garden that we are raffeling off the last weekend of our Open Farm Days. Raffle tickets are $1.00 each and all the money generated will be used to buy fresh produce for our local food bank. These gnomes look pretty happy in their garden home.

This weekend we will have 4 wonderful free workshops. James will be teaching on Saturday morning about heirloom vegetables. I’ll be doing a talk on creating a wildlife-friendly garden landscape on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday morning I will do a workshop on welcoming honeybees and native pollinators into your garden and in the afternoon on Sunday, Jerry will be teaching a fantastic workshop on what it is like to have a perennial garden in an arid climate. Please join us if you can for a workshop event. While you are here, we hope you will stroll the Farm Stand and see if you might find a plant or two to purchase for your garden at home.

This photo was taken in our flower seed crop production field. How is that for a very cool native pollinator  moth! Mother nature definitely knows what she is doing. This pollinator is perfectly suited for this flower.

Aside from the Open Farm Days and Farm Stand event on weekends this month, Chris and I and our farm crew have our hands full trying to keep up with wholesale business and planting fresh inventory.

The two baby cottontails living in the woodpile are growing fast and wandering further every day. They are just way too much fun to watch as we go about our work.

M’lissa is packing to move to Mesa Verde this weekend where she will be working as an archeologist park ranger. We’re so excited for her and hoping that this job will be one she can embrace with joy and excitement as she learns and discovers more about the ancient people who lived in that part of our State all those hundreds of years ago. She has been communicating with her two housemates about who will contribute what to the household, and coordinating all the details of moving and then settling in.

Chris will be playing tomorrow night for the Blossom Festival banquet with the Frank Sanchez band that he has been part of for many years. They are looking forward to the event and those who are attending can look forward to some really wonderful jazz music!

So, I’ll say goodnight and find my popcorn supper. Enjoy your first week of May.

Apil 22, 2013 Open Farm Days Start Saturday

This coming Saturday is our first Open Farm Day and everything is all in a dither to get ready, plus this is a very big week for wholesale orders going to garden centers. We hardly know if we are coming or going in truth!!

We have been working hard to get heirloom and heritage vegetables and fruits stocked into the Farm Stand.

Along with loads of different kinds of old-fashioned flowers from poppies to hollyhocks. We will be offering 7 different varieties of hollyhocks alone! Sunflowers will be out towards the second week of May, but there are plenty of other choices to choose from this weekend.

M’lissa has been spending lots of time putting signs into the flats and making sure that everything is labeled and ready…putting up price signs and so forth.

Carol thought she’d add a bit of humor to the task of cleaning and labeling pots. Carol has been part of the farm crew since we began the farm in 1996 and we are forever grateful for her help and the delicious cookies that she brings for breaktime.

Oh, and I noticed that the gnomes have moved into the little miniature garden planter that will be available as a raffle again this year. I’ll try to remember to take a picture of that sweet miniature fairy/gnome garden and post it up next time. Money earned from the raffle will be used to buy fresh produce for the local food bank when our Open Farm Days are finished at the end of May.

Well, if we survive the week of getting ready, the weekend will be such great fun. Come by and visit us on Saturdays and Sundays, starting this Saturday, April 27th through the last Sunday of May 26th. We are open from 9am to 4pm. Remember that we are strictly closed on weekdays to the public…thank you.

Free workshops are every Saturday and Sunday from 10-11am and 1:30-2:30pm. Look on the classes and events page of this blog for specifics on workshop topics. Workshops are outdoors rain, snow or sunshine so dress for the weather. No need to pre-register, just show up with pen and paper, a lawn chair if you have one to bring.

If you plan to shop in the Farm Stand,  and we hope you will, we accept cash and good checks…sorry no debit or credit cards. Please do not bring pets to the farm…thank you. We are located at 1270 Field Ave. in Canon City, CO.

If you are a bird watcher, bring your field glasses because we have loads of wild birds that call the farm home including curved billed thrashers, redwing blackbirds, a sharp shinned hawk, rosy house finches, gold finches and zillions more. You might even like to bring your nature journal or a sketch pad so that you can enjoy writing about or drawing the wildlife you see while you are here.

Hope to see you soon,

Chris and Tammi, M’lissa and Lizz, Carol and Beki, Doug, Elyse and Chris, two mostly helpful cats, and the visiting neighbor’s dog Shrek.