1st Farmers Market of the Season May 8th

So the first Warburg Farmers Market session of the season is coming up on May 8th a mere 2 weeks away! I plan to be there with a variety of items to sell. The list so far looks like this:

Home Roasted Coffee Beans
Aboussafy Signature Chocolate Chip Cookies - Worth their weight in gold we've seen!
Aboussafy Signature Marshmallow Treats - The kind Aunt Gladys used to make!
Aboussafy Signature Butter Tart Squares
Husband Convenience Baking/Cooking Mixes
Hand-Turned Pens
and Darren's Computer Skills!

and potentially some audio cd's of our first podcast and music we have written as part of our music group Celtic Cadence Bards, time depending!

The chocolate chip cookies are likely to be best-sellers considering how many requests we get to make them. Mom even has had requests to send them in parcels to far off locales, and has used them inadvertently for bartering and getting deep discounts on things she purchased because she gave them cookies!

We're making progress on the grounds of the farm too. Today we got the big gas furnace in the shop working again! It was far easier than we thought, and we are relieved it doesn't need major repairs (unlike my truck which we think needs a new engine pretty darn quick. we just replaced the transmission too, argh!).

In the next week, we are digging a couple hundred fence post holes and putting up the new dog pen and goat pen, and all the cross-fencing we're going to need this year. I have to arrange getting the old llama shed behind the house moved to the goat pen so we can get ready for the goats to come. That'll be interesting since it surely needs a tractor to drag it there, it's too heavy for my truck.

I was looking at the plot of land out back of the house where my kitchen garden will be and began clearing a bunch of the ground. It was easier than I thought and I was going strong until the sky began to sleet on me! I waited through 2 snowstorms this morning before it was decent enough to go outside too. As they say, in Alberta if you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes!

I can't wait to get my plants in the ground this season and see how they do. I plan to use the space we have as creatively as possible while trying to use methods to keep the weeds down. I'll be planting all along our east-west fence lines items that need trellising like the beans and peas and cukes. This will save our big strong trellises for squashes, tomatoes and other things. I'm going to make some bean teepees this year just for fun and looks. I'm also going to plant a large number of perennial flowers in strategic locations around the place to attract honeybees (despite my deathly allergies to them) to help pollinate all the veggies.

As the weather gets warmer, we are getting more excited to really pick up the pace and getting rolling! We'll be moving our blog to the new website hopefully this week or next depending on how quick i can build it, so stay tuned for that too!