So Many Updates, So Little Time

Wow, how did it get to be April 17th already?
The garden has been progressing in leaps and bounds, but the blog has been staying somewhat stagnant. I realized today that I really need to update, since people keep asking me if the Enchanted Broccoli Forest has a website. Yes it does! You're on it! I'm also planning on creating a Facebook page soon.
Also, why is most of my site traffic coming from Russia? That's awesome (Hi, Russia!), but I think you guys are a little far away to buy veggies from us.

So, things are progressing beautifully here. We have a 50' x 50' garden space completely fenced in now. It has 5 beds that are roughly 15' x 5', three of which are currently filled with seedlings and two more of which are being worked over and turned and generally made vegetable-ready. The greenhouse and every single one of our variously-sized pots and containers are bursting with plant life. We have set up the first half of an automatic watering system and just finished giving everything a nice organic seaweed fertilizer application. We have a fairy house in progress in a large half-barrel in one corner of the garden. I just purchased our next round of seeds, which include all the tomatoes we're going to grow this year (Eeeee! I love tomatoes!) Finally, and probably most importantly, I just filed our first taxes without a hitch.

View of the main garden space, newly mulched.

 One of the garden beds. You are seeing a variety of kale, broccoli, and cauliflower, interspersed with marigolds. That's a soaker hose running through the middle.

We are presented with what is probably the best possibly problem we could havbe right now: overwhelming interest and not enough veggies. Everyone I talk to about the garden cannot wait to get their hands on some of our veggies. Right now, we are coming up on our first real harvest, which (if I've done my math correctly) will consist of about 50 heads of cauliflower, 50 heads of broccoli, 50 large bunches of kale, too many radishes to estimate (seriously, an army of radishes), probably only enough lettuce for the four of us, maybe 25 bunches of beets, and maybe 25 bunches of carrots.
That all will be ready in late April through May. There's much, much more to follow; I had just hoped we would have a larger first harvest to show.

I know some of you are probably thinking that 50' x 50' is a pretty small garden space for a business. Well, it is. It's very small. However, I've seen insane amounts of vegetables coming out of a much smaller space. The name of the game is vertical gardening. All of the vegetables I listed above are colder weather varieties which I started in the greenhouse back in January, and none of them are trailing or vining plants. Whereas I can only grow about 50 - 75 heads of broccoli in one bed, if I were to fill the same bed with trellises of peas and beans, suddenly we would peas and beans coming out of our ears... Which is the eventual goal. Not literally of course, I don't think you want to eat produce that's been in my ears.
Also, the main fenced in space around the greenhouse is far from the only garden space we have. There's a (roughly) 10' x 10' raised bed right outside my front door, and a plethora of old garden beds in different areas around the 5 acre property, many of which have perrenials from  years past still growing in them. All told, we have 3000 square feet of garden space available to us, and plenty of room to expand if needed, and the owner of the property (hey, mom!) decides to let us.
Seeds are not an issue. We already do have seeds coming out of our ears, for every imaginable variety of plant. So really the issue isn't one of space, or money, or seeds, it's just: do we have enough to time to plant and tend enough vegetables to bring forth a bountiful harvest for our many prospective customers?

Hopefully the answer is yes. We all knew this first year would be a challenge. The start-up costs in terms of both money and labor have been pretty substantial, but not overwhelming. The real challenge is that none of us were professional gardeners before. We've all had our own personal gardens, and some of us (notably Phil) have experience landscaping and gardening for others. However, we're all pretty much rookies.That's changing quickly though.

This garden is my new passion. I've always loved gardening and learning about the medicinal properties and benefits of different plants and herbs. I have a substancial personal library of books on all manner of plant-related subjects, and I've been pouring all my free time into reading them.
My main interests and goals which have come out of this are vertical gardening (which I touched on above - basically growing UP instead of OUT, which saves tons of space), companion planting (taking advantage of the natural symbiotic relationships between plants), and various permaculture techniques. I want a garden that thrives based off of natural processes, that's plant-based rather than gardener-based. Yes, we have been and will be using some automated and commercial techniques, but for the most part I want the garden to take care of itself. That means plants which are native to or grow well in the climate of Northwest Washington, growing plants that fix nutrients needed for other plants into the soil, using certain flowers to keep away pests instead of nasty pesticides, and mimicking the plants' natural growing conditions rather than mimicking other commericial farms' growing conditions.

In other news...
Right now our business license only covers the sale of hand-harvested vegetables, but it is in the eventual plan to sell prepared goods (canned and pickled fruits and veggies, herbal vinegars, prepared meals, etc) and eggs. I currently have three grown hens: Pocahontas, Abraham, and Jah-Marcus. Yes, they are all female. No, I did not name them. Pocahontas is an Ameraucana who came with her name. Abraham and Jah-Marcus are two black silkie bantams who have little afros/top hats and sideburns made out of feathers. I named Abraham after President Lincoln, and Annie named Jah-Marcus.

Is this not exactly what our 16th president looked like?

We also just bought eleven chicks! Five of them belong to my mother, but until she gets back from Mexico I'm taking care of all of them. There are four buff orpingtons, three ameraucanas, three silver laced wyandottes, and one barred rock. That means we're going to get a beautiful variety of blue, green, brown, and white eggs soon. I can't wait.

BABY CHICKS ZOMGG...

Finally, I'm going to include a non-comprehensive list of all the vegetables that are growing/seeds that have been ordered. This list includes most of our varieties of veggies, but I'm leaving a couple out for various reasons. Just for fun, I'm listing them by color!

RED

Red Acre Cabbage

Red Warty Thing Pumpkins

Red Pear Tomatoes

Red Giant Mustard

Hooker's Sweet Indian Corn

Red Chidori Kale

Redbor Kale

Atomic Red Carrots

Devil's Tongue Lettuce

Rubine Brussels Sprouts

ORANGE

Pumpkins on a Stick (Eggplant)

Tigger Melon

Orange Burst Cauliflower

YELLOW

Pineapple Tomatillos

Yellow Pear Tomatoes

Lemon Cucumbers

Golden Beets

GREEN

Super Sugar Snap Peas

Fibonacci Broccoflower

Cascade Giant Beans (green & purple)

BLUE

Peacock Broccoli

Charmant Cabbage

PURPLE

Purple Vienna Kohlrabi

Purple Beauty Bell Peppers

Dragon Tongue Mustard

Indigo Rose Tomato

Purple of Sicily Cauliflower

Purple Peacock Broccoli

Purple Tomatillo

Purple Sun Carrots

Purple Sprouting Broccoli

Purple Radishes

Blauschokker Peas

Cascade Giant Beans (green & purple)

Dragon Tongue Beans (white & purple)

Romano Purpiat Beans

Have a fabulous day! I'm off to make a Facebook page for us!

Plant All the Things!

So, just a brief update and summary. I have transplanted all the seedlings that were in the big seed tray out into the garden, and they seem to be doing very well. They are all about 4 inches high and have at least 4 true leaves each.
A brief summary/list of all tuhe plants being grown right now:
Scattered around the property, there are two large rhubarb plants, four raspberry canes, two pots full of chives, spearmint, charmant cabbage, lavender, lemon balm, onions, swiss chard, and a plethora of fruit trees and blackberry vines.
In the garden beds and bathtubs by the greenhouse, I have about 50 seedlings in the ground which are a mix of broccoli, cauliflower, and kale. There's also four nasturtiums, a patch of elfin thyme, chocolate mint, and two little oregano plants.
In the greenhouse, there's plenty more broccoli, cauliflower, and kale waiting to get transplanted. There's a couple of large pots full of carrots, a couple full of radishes, and a couple full of beets. There are 4 bean plants which have sprouted and 8 more which haven't yet. There's more nastiums, some red bunching onions, more chives, lillies, roses, peas, and lettuce.
Inside, I have hundreds more seeds in dozens of varieties. I'm gonna go get planting!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I haven't been posting a lot lately because I don't have regular access to a computer, and its tricky to post from my phone, but I'll give it a shot. If there's any glaring typos, please forgive me!
So today was the first truly sunny day in a couple weeks, and I took advantage of that right away. Phil and I had been doing the bare minimum in the garden (watering and weeding in the greenhouse mostly) for a long stretch of miserably wet and windy days, and every day we said we needed to set a date to get some work done rain or shine. That day was supposed to be yesterday. I called up Annie and asked if she was ready to work, and got very annoyed when she said the weather wasn't good enough. Phil and I headed out anyway, and worked about an hour and half in the pouring rain. I was out picking up rocks in the field (more on that in a sec) when I saw Phil coming out of the haze towards me making the universal "kill" gesture. He was shouting but I couldn't hear him until he got closer.
"What's wrong?" I yelled.
"You wanna work in this?!" He screamed back.
"No!"
We went back inside disappointed, cold, and soaked to the bone. Our clothes were tightly plastered to our skin with water and mud so that they had to be peeled off.

Today, as soon as the sun came out, it was work time. Phil had to go to church to set up for the youth group he's now leader of, but Ann and Gio and I got some serious work done.
They couldn't stay too long because of St. Paddy's day obligations, but in the hour or so they were there they got some work done that would have taken me far, far longer on my own. Gio watered the greenhouse while Ann and I ran out the to the field and filled a wheelbarrow with rocks.
Let me tell y'all a little bit about my property. First, it's actually my mother's, not mine (you can read about her adventures on this piece of land at her currently dormant blog, www.newtofarmlife.blogspot.com). She is living in Mexico for a year (which you can read about at www.newtomexicanlife.blogspot.com), and I stayed behind to go to university. She is ecstatic about my work in the garden and said I can keep it up here as long as I want provided she has access to the veggies. Anyway, the property is about five acres, and is divided into several sections. There's three fenced-off pastures which my mom's goats live in alternately, and then there's the house area, backyard area, an orchard, a completely blackberry-and-grass covered area, a large grassy area in the middle, and the area occupied by my stepfather's garage that he works out of when he's not in Mexico. My garden is in the middle large grassy area. There are a lot of different types of soil around, and a lot of garbage and debris left over from a barn that got torn down before we moved here.
Over in one of the pasture areas, the soil is less than ideal. In fact, it's less like soil and more like sand with a whole bunch of rocks in it. When we first moved here, I had tried to build a garden over in that area and quickly abandoned it because the only things that would grow there were grass and poison hemlock. However, I just realized yesterday what a valuable resource those unused rocks are. I don't know how they got there. There are all different types of rocks ranging in size from fine gravel to the size of my foot. When Annie and I had a full wheelbarrow, we took it back to the garden and started filling the bottoms of the bath-tubs. When they each had a fine layer, Ann started filling them with soil while I ran around putting large rocks at the four corners of each garden bed (the start of a border for each) and then pressing yet more rocks into the mud around the bottom of the bathtubs. This was to keep them upright and stable, control the mud, and make it look prettier. The result can be seen in the photos at the bottom of this post.

Ann and Gio took their leave, and I spent several more hours weeding, thinning, and transplanting. In the photos there you can see two little oregano plants, some nasturtiums, and a bunch of beautiful brassicas in the full bathtub (the brassica family includes broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussel sprouts, ect and they all kind of look the same at this stage of growth). In the pot at the feet of the two bathtubs is a chocolate mint plant (mmmm!) and an elfin thyme plant. Eventually, once it spreads more, the elfin thyme will be transplanted out into the paths of the garden where it will hopefully thrive and create a nice squishy groundcover that smells lovely when stepped on. The last little pot balanced between the tubs contains lettuce. All the pots got mixed up at a couple points, but I believe its "Drunken Woman Frizzy Headed Lettuce." I didn't make that up. That's what it's called.

Phew! That was a lot of info. One last thing before I wrap this up and take a nice hot shower.
While downtown a while ago, Annie and I popped into a store called JJ's, which is it's second location. The first JJ's is located right next to our old high school, and all the students used to go buy lunch there and hang out with the owner on lunch break. Well it just so happened that the day we stopped into the new location, the owner was there and he recognized us immediately. After catching up a little bit, I mentioned the garden and the business, and described my vegetable vision to him. He was super supportive and excited, and wound up offering us space in his downtown store to sell vegetables out of!
I am so excited. I jumped up and down with glee just randomly for the next couple days after that. Thank you so much, Jay!

Alright. I'm going to go scrub off the mud and make a little dinner.
La la la I'm so excited... My garden is growing... Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!

New Seeds, Healthy Sprouts, Mysterious Balls, and A Dead Rooster.

It's the first day of March, and the garden is doing beautifully!

Broccoli, cauliflower, and kale sprouts in a seed tray.

Same sprouts, different angle.

Everything's growing! I'd say 90% of the pots have visible sprouts in them.

However, I do have some very sad news to report. My very first chicken, the rooster General Gringo, has died. I went out to feed the chickens, and only the two hens seemed to be around. I sighed, thinking that Gringo had escaped somehow, but checked the nest boxes anyway. There he was, curled up in a tiny white ball. The hens hadn't really gotten used to him yet, and didn't let him cuddle up to them on that particularly cold night.

When I found him, I picked up and carried him in to show Phil, and we were discussing what to do with the body when I noticed that my arm was covered in dirt... Or something...

"I'M COVERED IN BUGS!!!" I screamed, and ran outside, pitched General Gringo's body in the dirt, and ran back inside to furiously scrub my arm while Phil took the rooster out to bury deep under the compost pile.

On a happier note, we just received our second big order of seeds! This order included herbs and flowers as well as vegetables. I'll surprise you all with what colors and varieties these things are going to be, but I'll tell you I got beans, peas, cabbage, and brussels sprouts.

We also got a lot of work done on the fence! Phil and Annie in particular spent a good long time setting up most of a stable fence to enclose a 40x40 foot area around the greenhouse.

If you enlarge that picture by clicking on it, you can also see the beginning of a new chicken coop Annie and I are building to keep the chickens warmer and drier.

One last update! What on earth could these mysterious balls be for? Stay tuned to find out!

So Many Hoops To Jump Through!

Since applying for my business license, I have gotten SO MANY documents in the mail. They've presented me with confusing and sometimes seemingly conflicting information.
My main source of confusion right now is the process of hiring and paying employees. I want to hire Annie, Gio, and Philip as employees. However, I'm not certain if I will be able to pay them minimum wage. Before we realized we needed a business license to sell at the farmer's market, we planned on splitting all profits into fifths: a fifth for the business, and a fifth for each of us. Now, I realize that to do this legally, I need to pay each person minimum wage in accordance to how many hours they have worked.
What I don't understand is that there is no protocol for small (tiny, really) business that are just starting up. Starting a farm requires many hours of initial start up labor, and we don't know what our profits are going to be like. I called the department of labor and industries to ask about this, and the man I talked to didn't seem to understand the question. He kept repeating "You must pay all your workers minimum wage. There are no exceptions," and eventually hung up on me.
Either way, I'm going to figure this out. I called the department of labor and industry again and left a message detailing everything from above and asking what my options are.
But no matter what happens, I'm not giving up. I have a greenhouse full of beautiful sprouts outside that will feed an army of people when they are full grown, and more seeds on the way.