Grow-Along Week 8

Happy Beltane / May Day everyone!

May is always a turning point for all of our preparations. In just another week, our little tomatoes and peppers will be moving to the raised beds outside and many of our other veggie and fruit varieties will be planted from seed. We are so thrilled to be able to plant all of our gardens with plants we grew from seeds ourselves this year! What are your biggest accomplishments in planning or planting so far?

Grow-Along Week 7

Howdy friends!

The grow-splosion is still going on strong at the Micro-Farm! Green things are popping up everywhere! It is tough to keep up with it all in pictures, but we are trying our best to keep you updated on all the excitement. Spring brings such amazing and busy energy and we just love it!

We have had some friends who are new to gardening ask us for help identifying the seedlings that are popping up in their gardens as weeds or plants that they intentionally planted. So, the biggest focus of today's Grow-Along update will be helping you all to identify your little plantlets by showing you pictures of ours. We hope that our pictures will give you a good representation of what seedlings for common garden varieties look like so that you don't accidentally weed out the good plants.

Grow-Along Week 6

Howdy everyone!

So sorry we are a day late on our update this week! We have had so much going on here at the Micro-Farm that we completely missed our normal Thursday deadline. Plants are sprouting, budding, and flowering everywhere here, our Mason Bees have hatched and emerged, and our Chicken-Brigade is at full egg-laying power. This post is going to be super picture heavy so sit back and enjoy the updates!

Grow Along Week 5

Howdy everyone!

It is finally starting to feel like Spring here in Pennsylvania! We've been busy as bees lately cleaning up beds, planting seeds, planning new gardens, and getting new plants planted and situated. The energy here is amazing! :) As a result of all this, we've got a HUGE update for you all this week and we hope you'll be delighted to see how much is growing here. We would love to see what you are growing as well, so please do send us an email or Facebook message to share your gardening progress. Our goal with this blog and our Facebook page is really to create a community where we can all share ideas, techniques, and hopefully produce (seeds, fruits, veggies, etc) in the future.

Grow-Along Week 4

Our daffodils are about to bloom!

 Howdy everyone!
We've got some super-exciting news today that we just can't wait to share with you all! We're so excited that we can't even wait till after we show you the new pictures from our grow-room! Sarah (that's me) signed up to captain a screening of the new movie, Open Sesame: The Story of Seeds at the Crown Center Stadium 14 Cinema on Tuesday, April 29, 2014 at 7:30 PM. One of our primary goals at The Dusty Rose Micro-Farm is to achieve as close to a self-sustaining farm as possible. That means that we intend to save our own seed, start our own plants for food, and be able to repeat the cycle indefinitely as many of our ancestors did before us. There are many companies out there in the world of big agribusiness that would prefer to see that seeds be regulated and controlled, patented, modified, and restricted in use. Join us in screening this wonderful documentary that discusses the importance of seed freedom and helps to show us all how we can be involved in making the choice as to what kind of food we grow and consume. The showing is a special one-night-only screening and you do need to reserve your tickets ahead of time. The movie will not be shown if we do not get enough seats reserved for the showing. Book your tickets now (don't worry, your credit card will not be charged until or if we reach the number needed to guarantee the showing) and join us for this special event!!
Reserve your tickets today at: http://gathr.us/screening/7731

Grow-Along Week 3

Hiya folks!

We've got a lot growing on this week that we are excited to show you! First off, we'll be potting up the little tomatoes and peppers from the grow room soon as they are fast outgrowing their seed-starter flat. Many growers agree that tomatoes and peppers should be potted up as soon as they have their second set of true-leaves. However, we are operating on a slightly different method that many growers also swear by. We pot up based on root development. When our little seedlings are showing signs of their roots outgrowing their starter tray, we pot them up to 3" peat pots. Peat pots are, perhaps, not the most sustainable of options as peat is a limited natural resource, but we find them to be perfect for indoor seed starting as they are very forgiving when it comes to watering. Plastic pots tend to take a long time to dry out of if you get heavy handed with the watering can and peat pots are breathable and will dry out much more quickly if you happen to over-water. Peat pots are also compostable, and relatively inexpensive to purchase. Operating on the root-development theory, we expect to pot up our little plants one more time before they go in the ground in May.

Grow-Along Week 2

Happy Spring!! It is finally here! We made it!

So, we're super excited this week to share our growing progress with you. This week confirms a lot of the earlier suspicions that we'd written about when we talked about past seed-starting failures. The combination of excellent soil and a much better growing light have definitely solved our problems!

Two weeks into our seed-starting adventure and we are proud to report that we have a total of 56 little plantlets in our grow-room. We have some that already have their second set of true leaves coming in and they all look so much stouter and heartier than any seedlings we've ever started before! We are simply jumping for joy!

Grow-Along Week 1

Spring daffodils are coming up!

Hi again, Micro-Farm Family!
Welcome to Week 1 of our Grow-Along! We're super excited to announce that we have seedlings to show you! It seems our peppers and tomatoes have sprouted right on schedule and are being rather cooperative for the timeline we set for the Grow-Along updates. Also, we thought it would be fun to have a little contest since we've got a rather unusual plant getting ready to put on a display in our grow-room.

Preparing for Spring

So, I don't know about you, but I'm SO ready for spring to get here!

Here in Southwestern PA, the last couple of months have been a weather roller-coaster. We've had everything from 60° and sunny to -12° and icy. I don't know about you, but I sure am ready for sunshine, longer days, and warmer weather.

This time of year I always start to get anxious and tend to jump ahead of myself (and Mother Nature!) on my spring planting. The feed stores and hardware stores have started stocking seeds and growing supplies, and I find it so hard to avoid jumping in headlong and getting started right away. I just keep reminding myself that plants started indoors this time of year will outgrow their pots far too soon and it will still be too cold to move them outside by the time they do.