Lots and Lots of Work!

Since my last post we have made a lot of progress on the farm...  Hippity Hop Farm is officially born!
We were able to acquire two telephone poles from Geoff's boss, who also let us use the backhoe to put them in!  Thanks Ben!
Here are the photos of us putting up the hop poles a few weeks ago:

That's Geoff in the backhoe digging the first of the holes for the posts to go into.

In goes the pole!

So proud of his work!

Filling in the hole...

Surveying the glory of the poles.  There are three in all to support a 60 foot row of hop plants.

We then measured out our spacing and made a trench to plant the rhizomes in.

Covering up the rhizomes...

Our finished row!  We planted 22 hop rhizomes this year, Tettnang, East Kent Goldings and Cascade hops.

Here they are coming up the next week!

And here we have a hop plant that is about 2-3 weeks past planting date.  As of this morning we had 20/22 emerged! We are relieved they're doing well since the roots lived in the refrigerator so long they started to mold a little.

This week we will receive our order from FarmTek with all of the hardware we need to set up the trellises.  We're so looking forward to having all the infrastructure in place!

We used the backhoe on the same day we put up the hop poles to take out the sod in the new garden area.  Then we hauled two truckloads of bunny manure over and unloaded it on the garden (by hand, oof).  We planted all of the seeds the weekend after the hops went in.  So far we have a little friend who likes to dig up the onions at night... we plan to fence him out ASAP but otherwise the garden is going pretty well.

Sweet corn coming up last week, it is now all up in rows and growing quickly from all the rain we have had!

Our black beans were some of the first things to come up as well, and we now have almost a full row.  The purple beans came up a little later.

The plants in the greenhouse are getting lots of fresh air since we took the cover off the greenhouse a few weeks ago.  It was getting way too hot in there to keep it cool during the day.

We have been eating fresh peas for a week or so now.  The pea plants are as tall as I am almost!

I'm on my third harvest of radishes already, they're so pretty.  I used a tri-colored seed mix from Johnny's for these and I love them!

My giant sea of broccoli plants... I think I may have put them too close together!  They're just starting to form heads this week.  Some critter is eating up all the leaves on these.  Hopefully the fence going up will help.

I found out that I planted way too much lettuce, we are eating salad every day and barely staying ahead of these rows!

Brandywine tomato plant that was transplanted to the greenhouse in late April.  I probably should slap a cage on that!

We have found out very quickly how much work it is to start up a hobby farm!  We have been doing an unbelievable amount of work trying to get everything going.  Up above is a view of the farm from the road, you can see the hop poles in the back to the left of the barn.  The greenhouse and garden are right in front of those.  Upcoming projects, we've got lots!  We plan to re-roof the shed in front of the barn, fence the garden and greenhouse (working on that now), trellis the hops, and start raising meat rabbits!  I'd say we have a busy summer ahead of us...