I harvested worm compost about ten days ago and set them up with a new bedding material that was a Virginia State University hand-me-down: rice hulls and coir. I’m trying to find second-hand and/or recyclable materials for the permanent bins. Anyone interested in starting home composting with red wigglers (manure worms, eisenia foetida), please let me know. I’ll have at least four healthy, functioning, well-populated worm colonies by late April or so. Better to get them from me than mail order. Starting a new bin from scratch, with a pound of worms and no experience, can get a little hairy (and expensive too) if things don’t go smoothly and you get a die-off. Comment here or email me at peasantfare@gmail.com

I finished my first layered bed and planted buckwheat and amaranth just before the first day of spring arrived. The buckwheat will be cut down before it seeds (cover crop, green manure) but the amaranth I’ll use as a summer green and maybe feed the grain to the chickens. The layers were very earthy and soil-like, mostly: cardboard, then composted wood chips, roots, and sandy soil, five or six wheelbarrow loads. Then came about the same volume of muck from the chicken coop, including well-rotted straw, more cardboard, and another five or six loads of mixed deciduous and evergreen mulch from the woods. The bed is about 10 x 12 feet. We hope to plant High Summer vegetables there.

The next bed has just the cardboard and wood chip mulch so far. It’s more like six by fourteen and we envision it being ready for brassicas in late July or early August, the plants that never get in the ground because the summer crops are producing so well you don’t want to pull any out to make space.

Also, just before the rains came, I planted small seeds in a tiny bed about two by four or five feet: icicle radishes, spinach, danvers carrots and bunching onions (mixed), red beets, and romaine.

Then I came home and cooked, thinking how resistant I can be to change. I’ve gotten used to my winter routine of bitter greens, root vegetables, beans, bread, and citrus from Florida and Texas. Now I’m starting to work with fresh local parsley again, and could probably have local kale and other greens if I looked for it. Soon we’ll be eating lots of salads, berries, spinach, and tiny beets.

Behind Rostov’s, between Floyd and Main.

It’s near the corner of Rowland and Cary, between two row houses, and gets a good blast of southern sun during the middle part of the day. I’ve grown tomatoes and peppers and beans with less sun than that, at my old garden at Robinson and Stuart. Here you could put sun-lovers near the street and greens farther back. If anybody wants to tackle the job of finding out who owns the land and who mows it, and who lives on either side (would they like to garden?), I’ll help turn it into a planting bed before it’s too late to set out high-summer vegetables.

Sunny green space, as deep as the houses on either side, that ought to have spinach growing in it right this minute

Not sure where I’m going to find or build my kitchen, but it looks like Peasant Fare is back in business, this time in Richmond. Quality ingredients, simply prepared, as local and organic as I can get it. Comment here or email me at peasantfare@gmail.com

I’ve been harvesting worm compost, mucking out the chicken coop, and planting potatoes. I want to build a bread oven and a smaller “rocket” oven, and buy a couple of Lucia stoves. And I want to start cranking out some food again.