A day to celebrate the earth…

We recently elected to have 100 % of our electricity usage generated from renewable sources (wind, biomass, and solar).  Our electric utility company, Dominion Virginia Power, gives us this option through their Dominion Green Power program.  When you enroll in this program, the utility purchases renewable energy certificates in the amount of your usage.  This guarantees that the amount of electricity you use is generated by renewables and offsets the usage from conventional power in the region where the wind farms/solar arrays are located.  The more people who enroll, the more demand for renewable energy is created.  What a great option to have.  Thank you, Dominion.  It only costs a little more each month… to help keep our planet and all that dwell on it healthy by reducing carbon emissions.  Hopefully someday ALL our energy will come from renewable sources.

We had some nice rain last week, so things are really taking off in the garden.

Our overwintered patch of greens is now flowering, and producing seeds, which we’ll save.  These are turnips.  The blossoms keep the bees busy here early in the season.

The peas are flowering too!  We are growing only dwarf varieties this year so we don’t have to fool with a trellis.

My dahlia experiments continue.  Last fall I dug up part of the row of dahlia tubers, divided them, and tried to store them.  That didn’t work out.  The space where I stored them was too cold and the tubers froze, then rotted.  Luckily I had left about half of tubers in the ground.  I had covered them with some mulch; not a lot, and a few weeks ago dug them up.  I was surprised that most of them had survived.  So, now the surviving tubers have been moved to a new row and are beginning to sprout!  If I decide to continue to grow dahlias in the future I will definitely just leave them in the ground through the winter, and mulch heavily.

Always learning something new.  That’s why I love this work.

We finally planted the tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers.

Gavin finished grading the center section of the garden where the old tobacco barn used to be.  We laid out the rows for the first tillage.  We really need this space!  Almost all the rows we started in last year have been planted.

Tilling.

Even though we have way too much going on right now and no extra time, we are planning for future projects.  We laid out where 4 future high tunnels will go: to the south and east of the greenhouse (red flags).  I can’t wait to have this area to grow in (next year maybe?!).  This year probably all we’ll get done is work on grading the pads, till up the ground and plant it to cover crops.

We are looking forward to our first Farmers’ Market day, April 30!  We should have plenty of greens and salad mix to bring.