Nettles!

Thistle Top Farm will also be providing wildcrafted and foraged herbs, greens, and fruit whenever possible!  February celebrates one of the first new edible plants:  Nettles!  I suggest the simplest recipe: nettle tea with mint or ginger.  Enjoy!

First Sowing!

On February 17th, I sowed kale, arugula, lettuce, broccoli, red and yellow onions, and cabbage.  These will be transplanted in late March and hopefully will be ready for harvest in May.  They'll comprise the first  CSA boxes which will also include peas, radish, mustard greens, and possibly chard which will all be sown directly into the soil.  Hopefully my lettuce will soon look like this:  

Winter on the farm

Spring 2011 will be Thistle Top's first year, so there is much preparation to be done in anticipation of spring.  There was a tilling (mis)adventure that happened later in the year than I would have liked so the Crimson Clover cover crop is still just a bunch of baby sprouts, but it's better than nothing!  Everything else is bunkered down for the cold and rain and will get double dug or tilled in the spring with a little bit of compost or chicken poop.  Here is the bed of future carrots:

 Baby clover!

 Hibernating bees!

 Future potato bed in St. John's.