Moving to a new place can be hard- making friends, finding out what’s going on, getting involved. We really lucked out in this area… while we’re working away to get the farm started, we’ve come across a zillion other fantastic way to get involved in the community and make new friends.
Today, for example, we helped in the biennial Nehalem Estuary Cleanup. We were tempted to not go out of laziness, but after organizing community cleanup days ourselves in Guatemala, we thought it’d be hypocritical. Then some of our local friends started talking about how they were going to do it, too, and then it turned into a big ole’ good time. Our team got to ride a boat out to an island in the middle of the bay, a place that I probably wouldn’t have been able to see any other way. It was great to be walking around in the wetlands at low tide, with the cool breeze and marshy smell and squidgy mud under your boot. It reminded me of hunting with Dad a quarter century ago.
We’ve also been doing more “intellectual” things as well. Last weekend, Ginger at rEvolution Gardens hosted a seminar on how to better plan crop allocation and rotation, using computerized spreadsheets. It was fun and informative, and it was nice to see so many small-scale sustainable farmers living the dream.
Our battle with the blackberries rages on, but we’re giving them a break for now as we till up the soon-to-be blueberry patch. The roots from the blackberries are almost as much work to get rid of as the blackberries themselves, but now that we’re done with that too, we can put in the soil amendment. Our pH is 5.6, noormally considered pretty darn acidic. But for around here, that’s pretty lucky (Ginger’s is about 4.0) and still falls just barely within the recommended range for the acid-loving Blueberries. So, I will be adding lime to the vegetable beds, but the blueberry patch doesn’t need it. Yesterday I added a half pound of Borax and 20 pounds of bone meal to raise the B and P levels, respectively.
