egg

After a late blast of cold that covered the fields in frost 3 days in a row, the weather seems ready to acknowledge what the calendar has been saying for weeks: spring has arrived in Oak Hill. It’s felt like spring in Brooklyn for a month, but Oak Hill lags behind, and up there the lilacs are just wrapping up their blooms; the paperwhites are just coming up; and the gardens are yielding their first baskets of lettuce.

Krissy has been living at the farm since January, and has been blocking soil and getting seedlings going ever since. She’s done amazing work, and has hundreds of plants waiting for the last chance of frost to pass before she drops them in the well-tilled earth. Garlic we planted last fall is up and growing strong.

hardneck garlic

We’ve been trying to close the loop between the restaurant and the farm by composting some of our scraps at egg and bringing them up to feed the garden. We’ve also gotten manure from our dairy purveyor, Ronnybrook, and cocoa hulls from our neighbors on North 3rd Street, the Mast Brothers.

Every few square yards of Catskills soil yields about 50 pounds of rocks.

Compost sifter: after the compost has cured for a year or so, Krissy runs it through a mesh screen to get any un-composted bits out of it.

Compost tea

Our livestock at the moment consists of one dog and one cat. But we’ve built a home for ducks we hope to get in a couple of weeks, and we’re looking for some guineas to clatter around the place eating pests and looking funny.