Support Your Local Farmer Day

On March 27th of this year, Huntsville Community Church held a Support Your Local Farmer Day at our farm.  The winter had been extremely cold and wet and we were way behind on the construction of the new raised beds we needed for this summer.  Health problems had added to the delay.  Fifteen people gave up their Saturday to help us, a major blessing.

Here is the work area just prior to the crew arriving.  You can see the blocks stacked and ready, the land is tilled, we are ready for the work to begin.  The weather was very pretty, the first real nice spring day we had this year, even if it was a bit on the windy side.

The original garden beds in this location were as wide as our tiller, nice and fertile as we had been adding rabbit manure and compost to them for several years.  The new, no till, raised beds needed to be much narrower, so it was a big job to save as much of the rich top soil as we could and to keep it in the bed, not in the path between beds.

Eight inch wide landscape fabric was rolled out under the blocks, as they were placed.  This will prevent weeds from growing there until we get a chance to fill the openings with papercrete.  Michael and Judy made quite the team installing blocks, with advice from Garth.

By the time we stopped for lunch, both garden beds were taking shape nicely.  HCC1 was filled and we were working on filling HCC2 with well aged mulch.  The crew was starving by this time, having labored for almost 4 hours.

While I couldn’t do any heavy work, I did spend the day before cooking and baking.  It was nice to see my efforts were appreciated.  Everyone was so happy to see the sun that no very few people wanted to sit in the shade of the pavilion.,

I believe several new friendships were started, and extra blessing for the meal and the day.

While those who had not seen the farm before went on a tour, a few hardy men stayed and finished filling HCC2, so the beds were ready to be fertilized and put to use.  A wonderful gift to our farm, 1200 square feet of raised garden bed built for us.