Hello everyone, today we wanted to give you an update on the happenings at KMB Farms. The growing season is winding down, for me with Garlic it is the planting season. As we are wrapping up the farm work, we are already looking forward to what we can do next year.
Garlic
To date we have planted roughly 5,500 cloves of 15 varieties for next year, and we are two thirds the way done. This year I am also planting a couple beds of the bulbils, the false seed you get if you don’t pick the scapes. I understand that they are naturally free of disease and will produce rounds in the first year. Rounds are onion like bulbs that you save and plant the next season, and theoretically they will produce larger bulbs the second year. I will keep you posted on how this works out.
Soaps
Kathie is busy making more soaps, we are making both the 3.5 oz size and 1 oz sizes. Our goal is to reach out to some Bed and Breakfasts or small resorts and offer our hand crafted soaps for their business. We are also working on putting together some gift sets to offer for the holidays, stay tuned for that! Kathie is also working on a blog post about soap making, hopefully it will be the next blog post you see here. Thanks to our friends Brittney and Conrad we now have soaps in a couple specialty shops, and we have our soaps at a couple of local wineries, Blue Mountain Wine Crafters and The Rusty Nail Winery, thanks to Cindy and Tim and Mike and Shelly!
Lavender
Last spring we planted 500 lavender plants in a test plot, in checking on them last week, it looks like we have a 66% survival rate. The weed barrier we used didn’t work very well so there is some serious weeding to be done, so far the garden gnomes have not showed up to take care of that for us, looks like we will have to do it ourselves. We are hoping to grow lavender to extract the essential oils for our soaps and to have another product to offer in a couple years.
Next year
We are already starting to think about our goals for next year! We hope to try our hand at a garlic festival next year, I understand from others that they are well worth doing. We are considering doing a couple other larger festivals if all pans out for us. We are planning to reach out to bed and breakfasts and small resorts to offer our soaps, and possibly some other small specialty shops. Since the Lavender has survived both the flooding spring and the drought of the summer, it looks promising for a crop so we will be planting some more lavender in the spring.
As always, thank you for taking the time to follow us, please leave comments and suggestions, questions and ideas! Until next time, be a good neighbor.