Puja Preparations!

The Cow Puja and Farm Fair is this coming weekend! We have been working like crazy to get ready for it.  Our talented friend, Rene Lafflam, adapted our puja design for festive t-shirts, which are at the printer now and will be ready by Friday. (They will be $12 each, in case anyone out there wants a shirt who can't  come to the Puja.)

Rog spent the past two weekends clearing out the  north wing of the barn so that we have a covered area for our artisan vendors if the weather does not cooperate.  You have no idea from this photo what a Herculean task this was!  Happily, the  current forecast is for perfect sunny weather with  0% chance of rain, so this  cleaning may have been for nothing other than insurance protection.

Our friend Laurel and her sweetie Darin offered a Saturday afternoon to work on farm projects.  Darin and Rog tackled some brickwork in my long-awaited perennial garden. This garden will be the view out the dining room window and will contain lots of bee-and butterfly-attracting plants.

The circular brick border is just tall enough on the downhill side to sit on. The fence won't be constructed by the puja, and the new plants won't be very spectacular this fall, but by next summer this garden will be lovely. The artisan vendors will be set up along this garden at the Farm Fair.

In the meanwhile, Laurel and Darin's daughter Ella primed the blue flower cart for repainting.

The new color scheme will be green and yellow.  We will decorate the flower cart for the puja and sell t-shirts, beverages and treats from it.

Cadence tackled the high tunnel greenhouse.  It should have been planted weeks ago with the winter crops, but we could not bear to pull out the tomatoes, which were still loaded with fruit.

Finally we  opted to pull out 2/3 of the tomatoes and plant everything else.  When we pul out the remaining tomatoes in a couple weeks we plan to transplant some of the chard and kale from the garden into its corner.  Cadence herded the obliging turkeys inside to clean up the  tomato leavings.

She added compost, laid out the  beds and planted the winter crops.

This is how it looks now, but we expect sprouts in a few days.  There are beds of spinach, kale, bionda di lyon chard, beets, carrots, leeks, scallions, claytonia and lettuce.

Cadence and I just hung a banner by the intersection for the Farm Fair and Puja so people will think about it every time they drive by.
If you are in the vicinity, we hope  you will join us for a fun day! Turn left when you see this banner, and you are here.  Find all the event details and directions at the Squash Blossom Farm website