We are getting a lot of projects done on the farm right now.
The first one was to get the shade fabric back up. We take this down each fall when the logs go dormant and wait until the danger of snow has passed before putting it back up. One year we put it up too early and had a late snowstorm. The intense weight of the snow on the shade fabric caused all the steel pipes to bend! So now, we wait! It does mean we have a couple weeks of crawling around under the fabric finding mushrooms to pick.
Our employee Cyle and our WWOOFer David got almost all the shade fabric up this last week. We need a few more toggles and it will be done. It is much easier to pick mushrooms now! (Oh, WWOOF is World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. Check them out here.)
The other big project is the Almond House. There is a fair amount of I-told-you-so going on at the farm with this! Back in March I (the farmer’s wife) suggested we use the big roll of landscape fabric we had on hand for suppressing future grass and weeds. But The Farmer wanted to save that for something else (no actual planned project mind you) so we used cardboard instead. Fast forward a little, and that cardboard was absolutely no match for our grass!
So, we all took a deep breath – then we removed the cardboard and laid out the landscape fabric! That project was all finished up today with all the beds laid out. It looks really great now with not a speck of grass or weeds showing. This week we should be getting a load of compost so we can soon get the Almond Agaricus going.
With the shiitake growing and pickings every day, the fruiting chamber working nicely, and the Almond House coming together, we should soon be rolling in mushrooms!
Work still continues on inoculations! We are just over 4,200, so less than 1,300 left. Jeremy is making pretty good progress despite doing all the inoculations on his own right now. Our employee who would usually help developed a few physical issues and had to step away from inoculations. He has been able to do other work and has spent the last couple weeks getting the pack shed cleaned up and ready for summer, and working on the shade fabric and Almond House. Another employee was supposed to start last week, but he had to back out due to family issues. So we’re looking for employees again and continuing to press on with all the work to do. It won’t be long till it’s warm enough to start force-fruiting and then it will get really busy around here!
(p.s. I’m on a little winter project to add stories from our newsletter to our website blog – which I’ve been terrible at doing! So I’m adding in some posts and back-dating them in case anyone wonders what’s up!)
