Hello Again from Sand Holler!

While there has been a long absence of blog posts, there has certainly been no shortage of news at Sand Holler Farm! Between baby Willa, a full-time job, the holidays, and the constant demands of the farm, Marissa was in need of some reinforcements to keep the blog updated. That’s where I come in! My name is Jessica and my husband, Alex, and I moved out to the farm this past October. We were brought in to relieve Dale of the animal chores on the weekends (I guess he deserves SOME time off) and to make CSA deliveries. We’re excited to be a part of Sand Holler and I’m happy to be taking on some new responsibilities, including this blog!

Here is a brief update of farm happenings from the past few months:

We got one new four-legged addition this fall. Kitten, a lamb, was born on Alex and I’s first night here. Talk about a good omen! You can hardly call her a lamb anymore, although she is still very attached to Cat, her mama.

Harvest House and "Pre-Freeze" Garden

The biggest change on the farm has to be the completion of the “Harvest House”, the charming new focal point of the garden. This multi-purpose building has a generous area to wash and sort produce, storage for garden tools, and a small apartment for interns and WWOOF volunteers. With the winter providing limited produce, however, the work space has largely been used for sewing row covers to protect our crops during freezes. Our latest WWOOF volunteers, August and Marion, have proved themselves to be masters of the sewing machine and all of our rows are now sporting new, easily-deployed covers. The design is a vast improvement from last year’s and we are all very grateful to be able to “button up” the garden in a matter of minutes!

The garden is all tucked in and ready to brave another cold night!

Envelopes of seeds have been steadily arriving in the mail, bringing with them excitement for spring planting. While the garden has an abundance of kale, collards, and mustard, I think we are all ready for something besides greens! The garden is looking great thanks to the many helping hands we’ve had over the past few months, including Evan, Nicole, Austin, Keely, (another) Jessica, and, as always, Dale. Talk about Community Supported Agriculture! Cold hardy crops, such as beets, carrots, and lettuces have already been planted and should be ready for harvest soon.

Two of the goats have found new homes. Dandelion and Miranda have both been sold to families that have started home dairies. Five of the six remaining does have been bred and will start kidding in April. Here’s hoping for a less eventful kidding than last year!

Last fost...?

Determining the average last frost date for an area must be like reading tea leaves. If it were simple science, everyone would agree on the date. But instead, you are left with a range of dates and no real explanation for how any of them are arrived at. Besides that, no one seems to bother with calculating the date for places like Dale with a booming population of 500. But we do the best we can.

Using the Spring Equinox is kind of nice. It's a little later than the average of the average last frost dates! I've seen dates all the way from the end of February to the beginning of April. Last year, we did have a freeze on April 4 that was so hard it wiped out most of the tomatoes and potatoes even under row cover. Hopefully that won't happen again!

So with the freezing weather safely behind us (we hope!), we are getting the spring crops in. Dale has done a marvelous job tilling the open portion of the garden and turning that weedy area into prepared rows. Soon, we will have squash, peppers, beans and more growing everywhere!

With great enthusiasm, Mom bought us some tomatoes to get the season jump started. Many of our seedlings are stunted from the cold weather (we still haven't finished our hoop house!). So Dale planted them out this last week and they looked just marvelous. And then the weather report came in for Sunday night. Oh, it didn't sound so bad with a prediction of 38F. But we know that things are always different here in the Holler! We can expect the temperature to be as far off as 10F from the prediction (in either direction, but usually colder!). So an hour before dark last night, there was a frantic push to cover seedlings and the newly planted tomatoes. But the usual evening chores still needed to be done! So it was a race against time. Fortunately, we had enough folks to split the chores up and everything got done...and it didn't even freeze! Only 34F, but I'm sure the tomatoes didn't mind being tucked in anyways.

Soon...but not soon enough!

Garden Update

We continue to work on the garden to get it in tiptop shape for the start of the vegetable season. Things are going wonderfully now that Dale is here working so hard! Much of the fenced garden has never been planted but we plan to remedy that in the near future.



Our vegetable garden is a 100 ft x 150 ft plot - that's about a 1/3 of an acre. We plant in "wide rows" - meaning it's not like many fields you see with just a single row of corn or cotton that runs the whole length. Instead, our beds are 3 ft wide and 20 ft long. The garden is divided into 6 sections, each one for a different type of plant - the tomato family, the squash family, legumes, roots, the cabbage family and finally corn and watermelon grow together. Every year the garden plots will rotate so the plant families are growing in new soil. This helps build up the health of the soil by not depleting nutrients that a particular plant uses as well as prevents the proliferation of diseases. Currently, we have 3 of these sections complete...but the other three are coming along quickly!

We strive to grow a wide range of vegetables as well as growing varieties that you might not see in every grocery store. We've been having fun growing all sorts of lettuces this winter and are hoping to be able to extend the lettuce season nearly year round with some tips we have picked up. I think it's unheard of to harvest lettuce in July, but apparently it's possible - and we would love to be able to provide our community with this beautiful vegetable throughout most of the year!



But of course, we also would like to provide some of the staples. While we will never be able to grow all the onions and potatoes that our community needs, we want to get some of these fresh to you. We have red, white and yellow onions planted and they have done marvelously in this cool weather. Now if it will only not get too hot too fast, we will have some nice sized bulbs!



As the gardening season progresses, I'd like to bring you up to speed on how various vegetables are grown to help everyone really connect with the food they eat. We sometimes really take for granted being able to just pick up carrots, tomatoes or celery at the grocery store. But we don't always realize what really goes into growing that food. Stay tuned for more in depth discussions of the exciting world of vegetable growing!