Fences and Trenches
We really appreciate everyone’s positive feedback about the newsletter. It’s fun to write and I look forward to sharing our progress with you all. If there is anything you’re curious about or want us to focus more on in the updates send us an email or message us on Instagram. We would love to hear from ya!
Also thank you to everyone offering to volunteer or help us out on the farm! We will keep you all posted on any upcoming workdays. Likely we will need help in the future shaping beds, weeding and constructing our wash ‘n’ pack.
Beautiful Salanova lettuce in the greenhouse!
What we’ve been up to!
It has been an interesting couple of weeks. Weather wise we have experienced a hodge podge of warm, dry days and warm, wet days. The key take away being that it has been warm. The last frost date for Ann Arbor is May 11 so as I write this we are officially in the clear!
Of course, there is still a chance we could get a late frost but at this point it doesn’t seem likely. These hotter days have presented us with an upcoming challenge in the greenhouse though. Temperatures in there are easily over 90 degrees when the sun is high. Come peak summer it will be unbearably hot in there and plants will struggle to grow.
One round of lettuce, which prefers to germinate at cooler temperatures (around 75 degrees), has suffered somewhat drastically. But our most recent round has been impeccable. We found that the trick was to keep the seedling in the shadier section of the greenhouse until germination.
We are planning to alleviate the heat in the greenhouse long-term with a shade-cloth cover. We also are keeping our eyes out for an old refrigerator to convert into a germination chamber. Using an Inkbird Temperature Controller and a crock pot you can control the temps inside the fridge for delicate plants. Anyway that is a ways off for now but it is something we have been puzzling through.
We put the corner posts in first, then stretched string from corner to corner to give us a straight line.
The bigger changes to the farm have come in the form of some new infrastructure!
Firstly we installed our 8 foot tall Deer Buster fence to defend against unwanted critters. Well, most of a fence. Getting this fence up was a big win for us and was a nice project. Similar to how there are many ways to skin a cat there is evidently more than one way to build a fence. Magda and I discussed and debated most of them.
We settled on using Wedge-Loc corners and anchored the bottom of the fence down with stakes Deer Buster sells. In the future we plant to add a tension line across the top of the fence. I was pleasantly surprised by how (this is going to sound silly) see-through the fence is. From a distance it’s almost hard to notice it’s there. We tied bright pink ties onto each segment to make sure deer notice the fence before crashing into it!
Magda pushing the massive trencher (she's having a great time).
The other infrastructure addition was our new water pipe. This project is still underway but the majority of the heavy digging is done. And we did a lot of digging!
We rented a 48” trencher to dig approximately 400 feet of trench to bury a 1” pipe that lead from the spigot at our landlords house out to our garden plot. Using the trencher was fun, but by the end I really felt like we had taken on a bit more than we could chew with this project. We have been able to hook the pipe up and actually get water out to the field, which is amazing.
Unfortunately (and we did expect this) the flow rate is not enough to actually irrigate. So, we have another project ahead of us. The plan right now is to store water in IBC totes and pump the water out of the totes for irrigation. Stay tuned for that as there are still a few details left to sort out.
And that is where we are at! The next couple weeks will be finalizing our irrigation and actually getting planting.
Wish us luck,
Zach and Magda
Dog Star Farm
We got some more pipe, too. For irrigation.
