Farm Happenings at Gravel Road Farm
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Gravel Road Farm News- July 30, 2021

Posted on July 31st, 2021 by Brigid Ferkett

Big storms moved through this past week. It is difficult sleeping at night when there is wind, thunder and lightning, but we find time during the hot afternoons to catch up on our rest. A tree fell down along our north property line, in an area just where we were going to be moving the sheep the next day. Pretty lucky. We also lost a good number of sunflowers this week from the wind. Once they get blown down, it is hard to get them up again. (We plant extra as insurance.) 

We are working on adding more perennials every year, native plants and food plants. They take years to mature, but typically native perennials are better adapted to our weather and climate and thrive without irrigation or fertilizer. We have a four year old planting near the road outside our sheep fence that is starting to shape up. We have purple cone flowers, goldenrods, milkweeds, prairie sage, bush clover, flowering spurge, and more. All volunteers or grown from seeds by us!  Now that our house has been painted, we hope to install native plants and garden favorites all around the foundation. 

The tomatoes have begun and so there will be bulk boxes available for canning or freezing. We usually don’t have time to can during the summer, so we freeze them to can later. We don’t make tomato sauce anymore, just crushed tomatoes or puree and then create the sauce as needed. Look for boxes of tomatoes in your CSA emails, and at the market. Please save our tomato boxes and we will reuse them. They cost about $3 each. Supplies, seeds, packaging and everything else is more expensive this year. And we don’t expect prices to go down again anytime soon.

Thank you for reading and happy eating, Brigid and Ross