“Spiritual Growth – A Gardening Journal” did a nice write up of our packaging and sent us some nice kudos in a post entitled, “Heirloom Tomatoes and Where to Find Them.”  It is always great to get feedback from folks, especially publicly like this, that the work that we do is appreciated!

We recently learned that we have been selected as one of DotCom for Mom’s, “TOP 20 Gardening Sites.”   We work very hard at our core mission of preserving open-pollinated seed varieties for home gardeners and it is always awesome to hear that our efforts are appreciated!

Along with the Top 20 Sites page listing, they included us as their recommended seed source in the following article  – “10 Essential Lawn and Garden Tools” as well as in this article, “Thaw Out That Green Thumb.”

For those of you that are newly following the goings on around the farm, a bit of background.  Years ago, when the Victory Seed Company was just three or four of us all packed into the old milk parlor of our barn, we needed a toilet so that we didn’t have to run across the farm to the house.

I made mention of this need in a project page on our site and one of our supporters happened to have engineered a solution.  He provided us with plans for a fully self-contained, aerobic, solar composting toilet system which he dubbed, “S.C.A.T” or Solar Composting Advanced Toilet.  It was an awesome fit for our farm.

We took his design parameters and developed one that we could build using nearly 100% salvaged and re-purposed building materials.  If you are interested in learning more, the whole project was documented and is found on our farm page by clicking here.

Anyway, to make a long story short (I already made a short story long!), the building hardly gets used anymore since we built the new seedhouse and moved operations across the farm.  But since it is getting close to that time when we will be outside working, I did some routine maintenance today.

The composting chamber did not need to be changed.  I may add some worms and fresh compost from the garden compost pile to get it “alive” again but other than that it was fine.

Mainly all that I had to do was to make sure there were hand towels and toilet paper, dust, sweep, shake the rug, clean up cobwebs, and wipe down the sink and toilet seat surfaces.  As I mentioned, it is a nice, sanitary, and low maintenance solution.

The calendar tells us that spring started about two weeks ago.  I wish someone would tell that to the guy in charge of the weather!  It is just so wet here that is the continual rain stopped here, it would take a few weeks to dry out enough to work the soil.  I take daily walks out to our growing are and there is really no point.  The ground is so wet that there is standing water all over.  Not just in our bottom fields.  And looking at the extended forecast, it appears that we have another very wet week in front of us.

In spite of the weather, we have to move along and keep preparing for the inevitable season change.  As mentioned in a post last week, we got the majority of our tomato seeds sown last weekend when John was on Spring Break from college.  They are doing well which means that later this week, I need to clean out a year’s worth of “stuff” that has accumulated in the potting shed, get the greenhouse all set up and order potting material.  I expect that I will need to start potting up plants early next week.

The other night I blogged about our old hens.  Although we have never been big meat eaters, more than a decade ago when we stopped eating meat, we still kept our flock.  We have never raised them as meat birds since they pretty much become pets.  (We do eat chicken but not ones we raise – goofy, I know.) Our hens are kept for their eggs and for the enjoyment they bring just watching them.  I personally find them fascinating to watch.  I just cannot imagine a farm without chickens.

Anyway, another spring related event took place yesterday.  We got the poultry accoutrements dug out from the shed and got them setup.  Denise went and picked up a batch of chicks and they are peeping and cheaping, contently snuggling under the heat lamp and doing what chickens all do best . . .

New Chicks - Spring 2011