I have to stop saying “next season” now that our first sales are (theoretically) three weeks away! It was easy for decisions with no clear right answer to drag on, so a little pressure has been good for forcing a decision. After a trip to Hobart we now have containers to put the harvest into, a sink in which to wash it, containers for transportation, wooden crates for display and a blackboard for the price list. Phew. Compostable produce bags should arrive soon; paper bags and rubber bands are easy to find. I think we can sell things. We also made concrete progress on administration like insurance and regulations. Earlier scoping suggested that everything would be “fine” but no-one confirmed this even if we each hoped the other would. After writing sentences in reports about simplifying local regulations it was a relief to speak to the local council’s environmental health officer and hear that our compliance burden is reassuringly light and sensible.

Of course the whole plan relies on having produce. I became a little more optimistic that we’ll have lettuce, radish and rainbow chard in early September as long as the slugs don’t get to them. But to give ourselves some more insurance we’ve planted more of everything that grows fast. That means radish (sowed directly in the garden as well as seed trays, just to be sure), cos lettuce (to sell as baby cos) and salad mix.  Because it’s still chilly, our daily routine has become a bit involved: uncovering the trays on the heatmat (now eggplants, capsicum and chillies), carefully shuffling a set of shelves out of the laundry to get sunlight, and now carrying a table with the salad mix trays out of the shed. Then reversing that in the evening. Alex has not yet accused me of coddling the plants so it must be reasonable? But putting a second polytunnel in a sunnier place would obviate the need for all but the heatmat.

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We also spent some time preparing garden beds. We’re seriously regretting taking the advice of our compost supplier and having loam with the compost. And then not mixing it well when we made the garden beds. Three beds in particular had terrible results with kale and fennel that remained 6cm high for months. When I wanted to sow carrots this week I realised that they were essentially 100% loam with no worms or other insects in that layer. So we violated our no-dig principle and mixed in extra compost, with more compost on top. Growing plants will also improve the soil over time. This week we cut back more green manure (remembering to sharpen the knives!). In the process of moving the tarp across from the previously cut beds we discovered that two native (we think and hope) mice have been “aerating” the beds, building tunnels that they presumably used in between raids on my broad bean seeds. Since Ebbi didn’t catch either of them we can only assume they’re busy building a new home under the relocated tarp. I naively hope that they will move on after that nest disturbed.

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Real-life learning about growing continued. The purple sprouting broccoli from January has finally sprouted! Knowing that the plants could be in the ground for half a year we will also be careful about where we put them in future. Harvests of baby romanesco broccoli continue. To graduate to marketable full-sized brassicas it seems we will need to use amendments, at least in the first couple of years (boron and molybdenum, which are both allowed in organic growing). I would rather not add mineral amendments but I dropped chemistry after year 10, so until Alex takes on these decisions (he took chemistry in university) or I learn some more basic chemistry, we’ll follow the advice of local organic growers (our equipment supplier has been very generous here) and gurus in this kind of agriculture like Jean-Martin Fortier. Our spring onion experiment from a few weeks ago (to solve spring onions crawling out of their cells) has yielded a tentative conclusion: press the compost down and then cover the seeds well (1/2cm of compost).

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Our trip to Hobart also yielded a farm name that we both like and that isn’t yet taken, which was not an easy task. Hopefully we can lock in domain names and social media pages during the week and post links next weekend, although this may (yet again) be revealing our naivety!