Becoming a Farmer

Hello again world.  Its been awhile since we’ve talked.  My bad.

I want to talk about becoming a farmer.  Nick and I have secured 2000 sq. ft of farmland at Michigan Micro-Farm and along with my cousin Jon, we’re going to grow organic vegetables this summer!  I loved doing the CSA last year, but am suddenly completely enamored with the idea of growing exactly what I want and getting my hands dirty to do it.

This is Michigan Micro-Farm

We picked up a brochure for Michigan Micro-Farm when leaving the Sherwood Brewing Co. a few weeks ago.  Our CSA partners from last summer had just told us that they weren’t interested in doing it again this year.  We we’re pretty sure we didn’t want to take on a full share ourselves, and were considering a half-share when we stumbled onto this.

We can hardly grow grass in our backyard, because of light, trees and dog(s).  So, growing vegetables is pretty much out of the question.  My cousin Jon has always wanted more help, more space and more opportunity with his garden, so we decided to have a partnership of sorts, where we could grow enough vegetables for all of us and then some.

Behind Nick is our garden!

Last week, we met Jon to buy the seeds for the garden – I hadn’t yet secured our spot with MI Micro-Farm, but knew they had plenty of space available and Jon wanted to get the peppers started!  We drove by the farm that night to check it out.  One of the owners happened to be out there, so we chatted and secured a spot right then.  Now, its for real.  Game on.

Our garden at Michigan Micro-Farm

We stopped by today and it looks like our spot has been tilled.  We’re going to get some manure and get started planting very soon!  Jon has started some tomatoes, peppers and such already at home.

After visiting our garden today, we went to Lowes to buy some quick supplies to build a compost pit.  We had a pile of leaves left over from last fall that never got picked up (since we don’t really have grass in the back yard, its not a huge deal to leave some leaves for spring).

Nick fashioned this compost pit in record time. Nice.

The compost pit went together really quick and easily.  Unfortunately, that meant that we had to get to moving the wet and heavy leaves all that much quicker 😉

Close up of our compost pit.

It was actually a pretty perfect opportunity, because the leaves had already started to decompose and do the work we wanted them to do.  When they were finally all moved into the compost pit, the driest of the leaves had been moved to the bottom of the pile, and the wet ones are on top.  It was like doing a full mix of an already-in-progress compost pile that we accidentally started last fall.  I love accidental planning 😀

The dark spot is where the pile of leaves was left over from the fall.

Our plan for the yard is to build a patio, using patio blocks, to cover most of the dirt area where we have the hardest time growing grass.  We have been mildly successful growing grass in the back-most part of the yard, so we will probably place sod in that area of the yard.  I’m looking forward to the patio part :).

We also filled the tiki torches and cleaned the porch chairs today.