Hello!
The flowers are starting to bloom throughout the food forest. All the little ground cover plants are breaking through the surface of the soil. It's all coming alive. You Forage Strawberries in just over a month!
We've been working hard weeding and planting our 7,500 strawberry crowns. I've finished sprucing up the Flavorfest section and working up the hill. We've decided to start planting Honeoye there instead. Flavorfest just didn't produce well.
Phillip worked through the entire Wendy section and added more plants there. We are meeting in the middle next to plant the 2,500 Darselct variety. This is the section where we planted Charlotte in 2021, we won't plant any more of it. They were not prolific producers and were also somewhat difficult to source from Canada.
He also spent the weekend working on our fence. It's an expense and job we've been trying to avoid, but we decided it really needed to be done. Hopefully we don't catch too many deer.
Keep an eye on the calendar if you'd like to come visit the farm. If you plan to attend one of our Tuesday events please RSVP. Things change quickly with the weather and juggling family commitments.
Lastly, Phillip captured Caldwell 11, also known as the Bubble Nebula. He used the 8" Celestron reflecting telescope with a long focal length (i.e. very high magnification) along with our monochrome camera setup. Due to the high magnification, new techniques were necessary to correctly capture this Nebula. Most notably, the camera has a setting called "binning". Normally when you photograph, you use bin 1x1, meaning 1 pixel of the camera sensor = 1 piece of data on your image. In this instance, I used 2x2 binning which combines 4 pixels into one SUPER pixel. Doing so greatly increases the signal-to-noise ratio, allowing faint objects to be better shown.
I could tell you all the facts but NASA Science has a great description.
Hope your Spring is abundant, and you are able to plant lots of plants. Excited that my next update will let you know about foraging fruit!
-Gwendolyn