2011 Plans

 
Hello All,

We have been getting a lot of questions about The Urban Ton Project for 2011 and we thought it was time to post an update.  There is still a solid foot of snow covering our little part of Minnesota and everything has been dormant.  That said our chickens have still been laying like crazy: averaging 5 eggs a day since the new year.  That works out to 45 lbs of eggs already!  We've harvested a few more citrus and some herbs from indoor plants but not much more has been happening.

As the snow has slowly started to melt (we had well over two feet of snow cover a few weeks ago) anticipation has been building for the 2011 growing season to begin.   It wont be long before young garlic tips start to emerge from the ground followed by those beautiful asparagus ferns.  Our mouths are starting to water already!  We have made some plans for changes and additions to our landscape in 2011.  We will be planting some more blueberry bushes, another apricot tree, and expanding our strawberry plantings just to name a few.  The most major major change will be that we will be scaling back significantly in the annual vegetables we grow this year.  With that decision we not be attempting to grow most of our own produce.  In fact we will only be growing staples we will want to readily have on hand and some of our more exotic variates.

Hearing this you might think our enthusiasm and interest has wavered, but this decision is a result of our passion increasing to a point that we need to step back this year.  Daniel is preparing to start a commercial scale agricultural enterprise, and has accepted a job for the growing season on an established organically certified CSA to gain more experience.  With this job will come a long daily commute that will significantly decrease the amount of time we have to spend on our landscape, but more importantly a benefit of the work is as much produce as we want.  With that perk, growing everything here is a little redundant.

Between working on a CSA, the commute, and getting a business started we are letting the Urban Ton Project fallow for 2011.  We will give a few updates throughout the season, focused mostly on photos of the landscape so you can see how it has grown and evolved.

As always, feel free to send us comments, or questions about things we have done.  We are happy to share information!

Yours,

-Kate and Daniel