It might not look like it outside, but the farming season is just about to start for us. Next week we will seed leeks, onions and some herbs in flats. Daily, I am hanging in the apple trees, pruning, sawing, clipping, eating wood chips—which is hard to avoid in this wind.

I am also hunting for some tillage equipment, looking for auctions which are always fun to go to. I don’t necessary think people spend less money there than in the store buying brand new stuff, but this is a tribute you have to pay for a pleasure of bidding.

Spring tillage is getting more important for us since we bought a small Allis Chalmers G cultivating tractor. In order to use it in the summer to control weeds, our beds and rows have to be pretty straight and leveled. Small scale equipment pulled behind a rented tractor will do the job for us for that reason.

This year we’re also trying to be a more interactive farm, using twitter and facebook. It is amazing that you can keep your friends up to date on your doings with just a normal cell phone and text messaging. But don’t worry, we won’t post pictures of every single lady bug we will see in our fields. Unless it will be doing something amazing, like fighting a cucumber beetle!

We will also rent 8 new acres on the south of our farm, to transition it to organic land. In this first season most of it will be seeded with—most likely—alfalfa with spring oats. I am saying most likely, because we are still researching what would be the best cover crop sequence for that land for next couple of years. Cover cropping is a branch of a long learning process for us, containing also “tillage with purpose” (this is a quote from a tillage guru Gary Zimmer), fertility plan and crop rotation, a process that all together could be called soil health.

We’re staying busy!