Yesterday was a big day for my blog with 116 hits!!  Thank you, I bet alot of them came from Bruce Aho, am I right?  Every time you read a blog or a page from the other pages it counts as a hit and makes me feel as if I have had a visitor.  It feels so nice, the only thing you could have done better is leave me a comment to let me know you had come.  It is like coming home from shopping and find someone had come to you house while you were gone and you don’t know who it was.  Either way I do enjoy the visit as we don’t get many visitors here.  We live on the top of Baker Mountain and no one knows anyone lives here.  We have a long driveway into the woods that looks deserted so no one comes down that drive, it is not on the way to anywhere.  In the five years we have lived here only three cars have come down the drive, outside of the UPS truck, family, or Joyce our neighbor whose son I tutor for the ASVB test.  Those three were two people that were lost and one was a new minister looking for people to come to his church.  As you can see Norman is really a hermit by nature and I have found it is the only way to keep his stress level down so we have not made any “friends” here.  We know lots of people and love to visit with the other farmers at athe farmer’s market where we buy the things we don’t grow such as corn and mustard greens.  They give me all the advise on farming we need and all the company Norman can stand but we do not visit them nor them us.  I have my blog and all the friends that visit me there, which I enjoy very much.  Please do leave me a comment now and then and I will answer it.  When you leave a comment it goes to my email box where I have to approve it and then I can leave an answer and they will go on my blog under the comments.   OK  back to the farm.  When we came home in Feb.  I started tomato seeds in egg shells.  It was a new method I read about and wanted to try.  I used some old potting soil I had here which was a bad mistake as none of them germinated.  I ran out of that so used some garden soil in one 18 pack and all of those germinated and I got them transplanted into larger pots.  They are now ready to be put into the ground but I will wait until the blackberries bloom before doing that.  I started a second lot when I realized my mistake and those are now an inch or better high so yesterday I transplanted 72 tomato plants into larger pots.  The egg shells worked well and all I had to do was brake a hole in the bottom of the shell and plant shell and all into the pot.  The weather is nice now so we put a set of the black shelves outside in a sunny area and that is where we are keeping the seedlings.  When it calles for a night in the 40’s I will cover the shelves, otherwise they are staying right out side.  I do have a green house but it doesn’t get much sun.  In the woods it is hard to find a place that gets sun all day!  Tomorrow it calls for very stormy weather with lots of wind.  Very often if it comes from the west, the wind goes right over the top of us.  It hits the mountain and and we are just under the top so the wind goes over the top and only to tops of the trees move.  But if it comes from the south or southwest, which they call for tomorrow, the wind comes down the road and we get some good gusts.  So we will bring the seedling in tonight.  We also do not want the plants to drown from a lot of rain all at once.  I do hope they grow big enough to plant when the blackberries bloom as to buy 100 plants to set out is quite expensive so all I can grown will help.  McMinnville is the nursey capital of the world so there are lots here to get and we do get a good price but it is nicer if I can grown my own.  Most of the trees you get in a catalog are grown here in  McMinnville.  Any road you drive around the town you see the fields and fields of young trees growing and then being dug up, balled and bagged for shipping.  Very pretty with the cattle farms mixed in.  Today I write letters.   I have a daughter that writes every week and two cousins, one in Milford , NH and one in Florida.  Then I will do just a bit more weeding.  We had beet greens again yesterday and still have a row to thin so will have them again today.  The potatoes are beautiful.  We watch everyday for blooms so we can start stealing small potatoes from the plants but that usually doesn’t happen until about May 1 about the time the blackberries bloom.  The blackberry blooming is the sign that the last frost has happened and it is safe to grown everything.  It doesn’t always work, once in the while they have what the farmer calls a “blackberry winter” which is a late freeze like we had in 2007 but that is very rare.  Have a great day and let me hear from you.