So far, the hardest part about farming for me is keeping up with my farm notes. I’m keeping detailed notes on each item planted, with detail on when it was seeded, when it germinated and at what percent, transplants, and all of that detail. I’m getting most of the detail, but once in a while is miss a detail here and there. For anyone doing a farm (especially just beginning one), take good notes!

One example of not so good note-taking: Being that we have two very small hobby-sized greenhouses, we combined different varieties of seed in seedling trays. I had great notes for the initial seeding. Once the seedlings were ready to transplant into a bigger seedling trays, I had okay notes–to missing notes. It is definitely very important to keep tight notes when the seedlings are playing musical chairs. So, for some tomatoes and peppers, we’ll have to wait until they fruit before we know which plant is which. Sigh.

One lesson learned here is keep detailed notes! The other is one seedling tray, one seed variety… no mixed trays as we did this year. For the number of seeds we started in the greenhouse, that means we need more space than the two small greenhouses we have. Next year we’ll setup a larger hoophouse for our plant starts.