Looks like we're moving on to Plan B for the farm. What was Plan A, you ask?

Disclaimer: this is Sarah's interpretation and understanding of said farm plans. There are probably lots of errors. Deal with it. I'm no farmer and Phil seems to have lost the battle with technology and is no longer posting.

Plan A went something like this:

• Start a 2000 sq ft "kitchen garden" this spring. This involved
  -putting in some amendments to the soil
  -tilling in composted cow manure
  -planting the seedlings Phil started in our spare room
  
  
• Improve the soil on 1 acre for future plantings. This involved
  -getting more horse manure from the neighbors than you could possibly imagine
  -composting horse manure
  -at some point this summer tilling composted horse manure into the soil
  -planting cover crops to help fix nitrogen and lower the acidity in the soil
  -till cover crops in and then plant veggies
  
  Now that the bulk of our house-building consumption is behind us, Phil had the green light to really get going on Plan A. Up until now he'd been limited to the first things on the above lists. It was a little late for spring planting down here, but such is life. Unfortunately, he quickly learned that Plan A was not going to work. At least partly because:
  
• tilling Mississippi clay is hard and doesn't really give you anything good to work with
• our water table appears to be about 5 inches above ground.
  
  So, on to Plan B, which looks something like this:
• kitchen garden
  -till as well as possible
  -plant things like okra which we've been told will grow just about anywhere down here
  
• build some raised beds in which to plant the other seedlings we have
• start lasagna farming, AKA sheet composting, on the acre we want to cultivate
  -this involves essentially raising the ground level up 2 feet...for every bit of land you want to cultivate
  -you layer manure, straw, newspaper, and other organic matter till you reach the desired height
  -once all those materials have composted then you plant right in them
  
  As you can imagine this is very labor intensive and was what Phil was hoping to avoid doing. If you ever feel the need to shove some horse manure, push a lawn mower, or collect leaves let us know. We'll supply the beer!
  

Beware the ides of March

There isn't really anything to beware of down here (or at least there isn't anything specific about March 15th to beware of), but I thought it made a good post title.

And now for your irregularly scheduled update of life in Mississippi:

Last weekend we volunteered with a local organization to clear and clean up a vacant lot that will be the new home of the Starkville Community Market. The Starkville Community Market is our version of a farmer's market and it's where Phil hopes to eventually sell what he grows. We figured it was a good investment in the karma bank to spend the morning digging, shoveling, hoeing, and carting dirt for them. This new structure is courtesy of Gulf States Manufacturers--a steel plant based in Starkville. The economic downturn has hit them hard but instead of laying off their workers they are converting an acre of their land into farm land and having their workers work the land and sell the produce at the community market. The company also decided they would help with the construction of a more permanent shelter for the community market, which is what we worked on (previously they just closed off a section of road just off Main St on Saturday mornings). Pretty nice, huh?

Spring has arrived and Phil's been trying to get the farm up and running:

farm mid march

The house is coming along. We close on March 31st!

house-movin' along

Again, why?

To follow up on yesterday's post...why it's good for us that we're straight.

Why Mississippi? Why?

When people ask us how we like it here we generally say something like "It's great. Everyone is really friendly and we like that. Of course, we're a straight, married white couple so that makes things easy."

The benefit of being white in Mississippi cannot be underestimated. This is a place where the Klan comes out to protest at football games. While that incident had the sort of happy ending where more people turned out to protest against the klan than turned out to support them, the fact that the klan is alive and well down here is still pretty disturbing.

Here's another example of why we respond that way. (Thanks to Sarah's colleague for the great post--we recommend reading the oped he links to).