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market-farming - Re: market-farming digest: February 15, 2000

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Subject: Market Farming

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  • From: "Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: market-farming digest: February 15, 2000
  • Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2000 19:18:07 EST


Rose Lieberman wrote:

Hey, Dori. Hope all is well. (I would have e-mailed personally, >but I hought the group might want to know...)
How do you espalier tomatoes? Also, what do you mulch with?
Thanks, also, for giving us a sense of your companion planting. It >gave me a lot of ideas.

Everything is great here -- had to spend $300 on new brakes instead of on the mortgage on Tuesday but I'd much rather learn that the funny "thunk thunk" is my brakes dying on a hoist than coming down "The Mulholland" (you know a country road started life as a logging track when it is just a "The" without a "Street" or "Road" behind it). Though of course I always hate spending $300 on a car that's worth $500 on a good day.

Saw the Podiatrist on Wednesday and got a shot of hydrocortisone into my classic heel bone spur. Ouchies but I'm almost kinda sorta walking today, which I hadn't been doing for almost two weeks. Next week I go back to have casts made so he can create shoe inserts that should make me pain-free within six months -- but no surgery (!!) if I'm one of the 90% of people this will work for.

Got crummy weather headed for us, might have another Snow Day tomorrow. While I breathe, I hope.

Have decided that Ash Grove's Mister Spock the teenage goat bully needs work so I'm putting $50 into a goat harness rather than $150 into a cord of firewood; Spock is going to help me clear the deadwood out of the lower scrub forest. Cutting it should put me into pretty good shape for Spring Planting. Meanwhile Mister PITA Spock is sporting a piece of light-weight firewood duct taped across the back of his horns -- no more hooking other goats even if he can still bash and toss them.

New baby Willow is a definite candidate for Herd Queen. Spock bashed her and she yelled and bashed him right back! All two-week-old ten pounds of her against his 170. He was so surprised he backed up and left her alone.

Still pouring kero into the oil tank five gallons at a time when I can come up with the $10 for five gallons. Oil company won't deliver less than 150 gallons now that the price is doubled. Today I picked up a price sheet for a new wood/coal/oil hot water furnace that I can install in the garage (which I don't use for cars anyway), and can be scaled to supply heat for the house, hot tub, and greenhouse from that location. Cool, huh? And it'll be covered by my business expansion loan and I have to replace the old furnace within the next few years anyway. I love it when it starts to come together....

Five restaurants are interested in coming in as CSA members. They especially like the winter mesclun possibilities, willing to write Letters of Intent To Do Business to help me get the loans I need to build the greenhouses. We're talking more next week (winter recess -- big reason I took this teaching job).

Also talking to the folks at the Food Bank Warehouse about starting the regional farmer's market there in July.

Sending in my Farm Bureau membership. Last year, I swear. I'm finding other insurance. This last bit from them supporting GE just sets my shorts on fire.

Re: espaliered tomatoes -- drive fence stakes (I used green metal ones) along the row. Lash poles or saplings across, like stringers for a fence. Tie the tomato vines up and along those stringers, prune just enough to keep them neat. Air circulates well, sun gets to tomatoes, you can grow eight times the tomatoes possible with just putting one plant per stake. Tah dah. I've got video showing my technique, some day will get the software to post it on my site. Hmm -- school might have it, I'll see what I can do in that direction. For mulch I use compost and leaf mold and lower-story intensive plantings of carrots and basil and garlic. Bug prevention and loving neighbors as well as no room for weeds!

This weekend I'm applying to be a Presenter at the NOFA conference in August, in Massachusetts. What company -- Eliot Coleman is the KNS! I'll just be talking about my permanent raised bed agroforestry project and $4100 SARE grant for same.

And thinking snow. It would be kewl to have a Snow Day right before recess -- they were wild today and will be worse tomorrow. The students, I mean. The goats are just a little goofy because of the coming storm. Yesterday I got 20 bales of beautiful mixed grass hay delivered -- had been hunting for hay, any hay not moldy thank you, less than $5 per bale thank you, for a week. $2 per bale stacked in my barn aisle, 100 more held for me at that price. Put up by a goat farmer! Yes! Goats are crazy with happiness looking at the bounty. So were chickens until I covered it with old sheets so they couldn't foul on it, those foul fowl.

"Not the Momma" is very comfortable but huge. Either she's got three or one is bent in half and I'm feeling a head and a butt. Mom loves being pregnant, loves her babies too. She and Buffy have been sharing the job of keeping Willow warm at night, she cuddles between the two of them. Storms usually make goats deliver. Go figure. Vet charges double the usual trip fee. After spending $600 on Heidi my $10 First Goat last year and ending up with two babies, one of whom died six months later and losing Heidi after all of it anyway, I have explained to Momma that it's her and me, Kid. So we're Ladies In Waiting together for the nonce. Here's hoping she pulls a Buffy and I find out there's a baby because there's a new voice yelling for supper -- no interference from me! Of course, Buffy is half Spanish Tough-Girl Meat Goat and her mother is an Alpine/Nubian high-maintenance professional dairy doe. Willow's daddy was my registered Alpine, she's a long tall carbon copy of him right down to the way she nuzzles into my armpit when I pick her up for a cuddle -- just like he did when I got him as a 3-month-old weanling.

Still working on selling the idea of sharing the goat herd in a co-op arrangement. People just don't know what they're missing. Sigh.

Hooking up the scanner on Saturday, baby pictures will be up by Sunday.

Dori Green
Ash Grove Community Farm
http://www.ic.org/agrove



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