January
2010
Spring seems so very close
Hello everyone,
I don’t know about the rest of you but right about now spring is starting to nag at me almost daily. The thought of planting seeds and planning out the CSA is pervasive. This past weekend included a great three hour class for the Idaho Falls Community Gardens, the class flowed quite well and I covered some basics of vegetable gardening in Southeast Idaho. We continue to have some fresh chickens available, about 60 left last time I counted, seems we have a following of people who just want one a week which is easy enough to accommodate. Oh yeah, I started a new job with the INL providing technical support. Its been a busy few weeks…..
We are starting to plan out the growing year. Usually this is a loose plan of things we want, need and hope. This year we plan on being slightly more conservative than we have been in previous years as far as number of new varieties we try to plant and maintain. Instead we will focus a bit more on quantity produced. In previous years we have dumped all the income from our sales back into the business itself. We started 2 years ago with a small nest egg and bare pasture. After two years of dedication and putting every penny back into the business two major things have been achieved. 1. a viable organization is developing, the business is establishing a clientèle, and overall volume and sales have increased significantly. 2. We consumed our nestegg, even went into debt to grow the business. This coupled with the immense workload is difficult to sustain to say the least. This year we are going to focus on at least paying ourselves something for our efforts instead of just putting all the money back into the business.
The glass for the Idaho falls Community garden went pretty good. I was surprised at the level of interaction with the audience. Many people had great questions showing some astute interested in the topic at hand. The topic being basic vegetable gardening in SE Idaho. With the unique and challenging circumstances we face in our climate there was certainly plenty to cover. The class was suppose to be 2 hours but with all the questions and interest we managed to take things into just over three hours. I was fairly nervous standing up in front of 70 strangers, most of which were older than I, and being the expert on the topic with any manner of questions coming at me from left field. However, now that it is all said and done, I am quite pleased with how it all went, I would call it a definite success.
The chickens are doing great. Its amazing how fast they grow. Out of 300 only 60-70 remain. The soil in the greenhouse will be amazingly produtive as we have managed to turn almost all of the 1000 sq ft house’s soil down to an average depth of 4 foot. With the leaves and chicken manure we have incorporated into the soil, we have essentially created a greenhouse wide hotbed and therefore we expect to have a great early season production of greens in that greenhouse.
Dewayne Arave 
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