Over the next few days I will prepare the soil on our farm for the 2011 growing season. This means spreading and tilling in 50,000 lbs of composted horse manure, laying out beds, and doing some early season planting. Thankfully I have this handy John Deere tractor to handle the heavy tasks.
I am beginning the year with a decent base of topsoil; however this wasn’t always the case. In fact the land that I now farm used to look like quite a bit different.
The Ice Storm
In early 2002 we moved from Raleigh to just outside of Chapel Hill to a house built on an all-wooded, ten acre lot. We certainly had no intention of farming at that time. Within that ten acres, four acres were in a dense pine forest (we cleared one acre for our house). Continue reading
