The Logging Workshop went well today with seven participants who spent the day in the woods learning how horses can be used to safely bring logs out of the woods. Skidding logs with one horse then two horses.
Month: February 2012
February on the Farm
The CSA seed order was sent in and the seeds have arrived. It’s always important to take the time to sort through them and make sure that all the seeds I ordered actually arrived. Sometimes there is a slip between my list and the order form and sometimes the seed companies make a mistake. As a result, I have learned to always check the order so that we don’t end up in the greenhouse or field ready to plant and not have the seed we thought we had…Ken made me some lovely dovetailed wooden boxes a couple of years ago to put the small packets in to help keep them organized.
The new greenhouse is enclosed and it gets quite warm inside on sunny days. We have one small fan installed and even with just that running it kept it from freezing one night when it was -10 degrees Celsius outside. We are encouraged that the in-ground rock heat sink will really make a difference in heating and evening out the day-night temperature difference in the greenhouse.
Two of the kittens from last summer’s stray cat’s litter have been neutered and are fully recovered. They were busy today mousing in one of the hoop houses. It is an important job. I can see tunnels where the mice have been active in the nice warm hoop house during the winter. One spring we had our head lettuce transplanted into the hoop house and nicely tucked in with row cover to be ready for the first spring CSA pick-ups. When I uncovered them to weed I discovered, to my dismay, that all of one variety of head lettuce had been neatly munched off entirely! Since then I have been very concerned to eliminate the mouse population in the hoop houses before spring.
On Saturday, February 18th we are giving a Horse Logging Workshop here in our woodlot. Ken is busy this week getting the horses back into shape and cutting down some trees to pull out. He does selective cutting in the woods to thin it out to give the better trees more room to grow. The thinned trees provide us with our fire wood and some logs to saw for lumber. During the workshop the horses pull the logs out of the woods. Horse logging is much gentler on the woodlot and does much less damage to the remaining trees that using big machinery.