We are gearing up to start our farmers market season. We’ve been making lots of soap, cleaning up and reconfiguring our display… and getting excited for a really busy market season! We have been at South of the James through the winter and will continue to be there every Saturday, but this weekend is also the start of the West End Market on Saturdays! Next week starts the Wednesday Aw Shucks market. Then the following week is the big kick off and all five of our 2015 markets will be open! We are so excited to see all of our regulars at the West End Market and bring our goat milk soap to a whole bunch of new people at all of the new markets that we will be vending at this year.
Tina, our doe who is due to kid in June, is starting to show. Normally she is quite slender but now she has a little stomach that pokes out. We didn’t ultrasound her for confirmation because if she didn’t get pregnant on the first try we weren’t going to breed her again this year. A June kidding is already going to be difficult (with the flies and everything) and I wasn’t willing to put her, or her kids, through a July kidding, so we figured that it would become obvious that she was pregnant and that would be confirmation enough for us. In the last week or so Tina has started to fill out, and considering she has never gone back into heat, we are positive at this point that she is pregnant.
The garden continues to grow at a rapid rate. We are barely keeping up and the garden doesn’t exactly look pretty at the moment, the pathways are over grown, and the weeds are catching up with us already, but beds are getting prepped and the plants are making it into the ground and are growing… so that is all that matters. I have been going out through out the day for 15 minutes increments to pull weeds, then we spend 3+ hours in the garden each afternoon. The cabbages are getting huge and the broccoli is chugging along. The potatoes are all over the place and the peas are getting quite tall. One of my big focuses recently has been working on building perennial beds throughout the garden to give the beneficial bugs a permanent home while giving us beds that will provide food year after year without us having to replant. Currently I have a bed (4×25 feet – 100 sq. ft.) half way filled with strawberry transfers from our other garden and from our friend Toni’s garden. We plan to put in a bed of artichokes in the next few weeks, and we will have many perennial flowers, like chamomile and echinacea, scattered everywhere. In the fall I hope to put in a bed of asparagus… my favorite vegetable.
Well, that’s all for this week! I hope to see all of you out at South of the James and West End Farmers Market this weekend!