Welcome to our site!

Welcome to the new Mighty Oak Farm site and blog. The site is still very much a work in progress, but we have to start somewhere, and the blog is first. We're hoping to get a little more serious with our farm project in 2024. That starts with sharing information here. First, we want to thank Autumn Arts for drawing up a wonderful logo. The logo does a good job of encompassing what we're all about: growing food for a healthy ecosystem and embracing native plants.

It's mid-April here in southern Wisconsin, which means seed starting is underway. We're starting a bunch of our typical vegetables like peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes. Garlic and wheat are up and were planted last autumn. Our planting space will be a modest size again as we continue to fight through invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle. We hope that from what we're growing, we'll be able to offer a small amount of seed in the fall to get our store going.

Aside from that, we've got some new nursery beds made and hundreds of elderberry and currant cuttings going for local sale next spring.

As for 2024, our goals are to continue expanding production areas. This means more fruit, more native plant areas, and more space for general vegetable production. With most buckthorn and honeysuckle removed, we'll actually be able to walk on the back half of our property and do something with it.

Coming up, you should see posts on:

• Switching from overhead irrigation to drip irrigation
• Beginning a multi-year planting of native oak savannah so we can start offering more native plants and seeds
• Better utilizing our chickens to keep land clear by building a new mobile chicken coop and run
• Bioacoustics work to establish a baseline of the types of birds and bats occupying the current space and how our work affects the population, hopefully seeing more activity and diversity over time.
• Defeating quack grass without chemical inputs

That's all for now. We'll also be working on plant profiles to help act as manuals for some of the stuff we'll be selling in the fall. Hopefully, this information can help others take back part of the food system and build a better environment.