Patience Produces Purple Peppers

The (Capsicum annuum) Purple Belle Pepper seed tray that I planted more than a month ago were about three steps from being dumped into the compost, and replanted with something that would actually grow, I was angrily thinking two days ago.  I had half the tray full of Tigerella tomatoes and they are growing like weeds, then there was the other half which was just moist soil.  How disappointing, I thought. 

But the peppers came through… at least some of them decided to anyways.  Maybe it was the telepathy, maybe it was the 90 degree window sill for three days (our little New England mini-April heat wave) … well whatever it was, some of them decided to become productive. 

So much for “extremely easy to grow in practically any climate” on the seed packet.  We’ll see about that. 

But really, have you actually read the seed packets… all of them?  Aren’t most of the little envelopes just waiting to produce reliable, abundant and high yielding crops? They are all also frighteningly easy to raise and covered with more examples of overwhelmingly positive language… I am right, aren’t I?  How about some realism on the seed packets: “Most gardeners will have a mediocre outcome  after much fussing and time invested, so…good luck” or some such nonsense?

• If anyone would like to purchase Fresh Chicken Eggs — we are delivering for $3 dozen. Just call 413.625.2797 or send us an email and we’ll get you on our local route.
• It is grilling season, and Heritage Pastured Belted Galloway Beef in bulk (not patties) is only $5.25 a pound.  get yours before it is gone! We have patties available, as well as yummy grassfed steaks (great for grilling for MOM!)

Summer Already?

April 25th. The roosters were crowing at 5 a.m. It was a warm 50 plus degrees for morning chores. The temperature is expected to rise into the mid 80′ s today.

Last night I planted the main garden with some cool weather crops — better late than never? Perhaps we’ll return to more springlike weather and everything will be alright.

But today seems like summer.
And the best part? My four year old is in his first fishing derby today at Look Park in Northampton. This is very funny — fishing seems *so* summery to me — and this is a four year old — he received his first fishing pole (a plastic Spiderman rod) for his fourth birthday in February, and he has asked to go fishing every day ever since.  Not that the kid has ever fished before… but he desperately wants to, he thinks.  It seems like a quiet and still sort of sport, so I think that the fit might not be quite right with our four year old.   Mind you, I would love it if he developed the ability to sit still and be silent…the realist in me is screaming: naaahhhh.

We may have been successful with becoming the “grandparents” of future piglets yesterday. The red neighborhood boar was trying his darnedest to successfully “make” Gloucestershire Old Spots cross babies, as it were, with the second GOS lady pig.  We think that the other one is already pregnant — but only by a few weeks.
Swine flu is in the news.   Swine flu is scary stuff — not just because it has a 7% mortality rate (more than twice the 1918 flu mortality rate), but  because it has very little to do with pigs other than sharing a name.

Let it be know that our pigs: the Tamworths, and the GOS’s, have been on the premises long-term, and the neighborhood boar is extremely healthy and lives just down the road. Essentially our little farm is a closed operation. As you can probably guess, our family is extremely local in all ways: we shop locally, we vacation locally (except when we escape to Freyburg or York Maine) we are really homebodies…er… farmbodies — we have far too many critters who depend on us being there for them to travel very far.