Let me start this post with a confession – neither Alan nor I have even half a green thumb between us.  So we are going to need some help and that help is in the form of the ‘Small Farms’ program that is part of the county extension program. This link shows the schedule of the workshops held in 2015 as part of this program. The 2017 schedule is yet to be posted; but it is expected to run over the months of January to April. Perfectly timed for us to start our planting in the Spring of 2017.

The extension program should also be a good source of information for working with bee-hives.

We were introduced to the Seed Exchange movement by Ianto Evans from the Cob Cottage Company and have located the Maryland/DC chapter.  We need to check if we can obtain seeds without contributing anything since this operates on a Barter system. Since we don’t have seeds to contribute, we might take food for the participants.

We have approached Sun Nurseries and talked to its owner – an extremely nice and knowledgeable gentleman. He talked to us at length about the issues involved in purchasing fruit trees and things we need to watch out for. We plan to finalize on the list of trees and place an order with him by October of this year. Apparently this land was used as an orchard long ago and we hope to talk to the owner on Settlement Day to find out more about the history  and details of the fruits grown and where they were planted on the land.

The seller’s agent was kind enough to inform us about the Forest Stewardship program.  Since we do not want to destroy any of the forestry on the land, we are good candidates for this program. The Forest officer will be meeting up with us sometime after settlement to discuss the details of the program. If we agree to go ahead, he will visit us again for a detailed walk through and discussion of the trees/species growing on the land.

Then there is the small issue of preparing the land for planting the vegetables and fruit trees. The area that we have earmarked for planting the fruit trees used to house a small building that served as the shop for the orchard. We dug down a little on the ground and found that some of the foundation stones are still present. Not an insurmountable problem; but we might end up picking topsoil from the county dump for planting the fruit trees.  We will also pick up mulch from the dump; but we might consider creating some ourselves from all the dead wood lying about – we have our eye on an old wood chipper that we saw at an Architectural Salvage store.

We also need to setup fences to protect our gardens from critters and deer. You can look up more details about the detailed scheduling here and watch us track the expenses incurred over here.

The slide below shows some of my attempts at vegetable gardening over the past few years.