Life on an organic farm is.... Filled with interesting smells! We've got it all from garlic, to cow manure, to hay!

This slightly rainy morning started off with some transplanting inside the greenhouse. Prize Choy occupied my time as I had to ever so gently remove the small seedlings of this plant, which were growing altogether, into individual cells of a six pack. You have to be careful to maintain as much of the root system as possible when transplanting, so that the plant won't die.

Everyday, the same chicken sits in the corner of the greenhouse to lay her egg. When Ellyn and I came in this morning, I think we disturbed her routine as she kept making noises and unfortuantly I don't think she ever laid her egg!

As the sun slowly emerged from the clouds, we headed out into the garden to weed around the garlic. Once again we used the Action Hoe, but couldn't use it too close to the garlic, so by hand pulled a majority of the weeds. After weeding, Ellyn, Hannah and I set up a drip irrigation system. Long flat plastic tubes were dragged out from the cobwebs of the old dairy cow barn, to the main garden. We connected them to the hose, and pinned them down with arched stakes, close to the rows of garlic.

Plants need at least an inch of water a week, so this system brings water right to the soil by the stem of the garlic plants in case it doesn't rain. It's conserves more water that traditional, overhead watering, where much water is lost by evaporating off the leaves.

After the water system was set, we mulched with hay. Maddie helped as we loaded hay from the wagon into our wheelbarrows. The hay prevents weeds from growing, meaning less weeding for us! It also traps in moisture. Weeding, setting up the irrigation and hay mulching for the 6 rows of garlic took us just about the entire afternoon!

And lastly our final crew member arrived today, another Eric Noel oddly enough! He'll be working with Maplewood's Eric Noel with the cows.