Heavily overcast, downright chilly, with rain threatening at any moment…still, a great first day at the market! In all the excitement, I forgot to take a picture of the stand as it was when we started, it looked good for a tiny spread of three trays… We sold out of mesclun and spinach in a couple of hours, while the Jerusalem artichoke, a veg that like as not had NEVER before been seen at this market, lasted all day but turned out to be a bit of a hit, with maybe 10lbs (4.5kg) sold! A bit of sage, thyme, oregano and chives rounded things out. This early in the season, the vendors were almost all crafts and prepared stuff—baked goods, cheese curd, maple syrup,…—and crafts, plus bedding plants and some fresh produce: storage potatoes, rhubarb, one stand with wild leek… And the traffic wasn’t huge, no surprise, especially with the weather. BUT, chatting with other vendors and regular customers for the first time after the winter was excellent! Really, connecting with people through fresh food at the farmers’ market makes tiny farming all make sense to me…
rain
Green day
It’s a gray day today, as it’s been for most of the last few, but out in the field, it feels green. We’re at about 1.5″ (37cm) of rain in total, and the ground is nicely soaked (and a little too wet to work). The grass surrounding the garden is looking particularly inviting this year, since today’s lush green carpet is tomorrow’s GRASS MULCH. The temperature is up as well, and some sunshine is on the way (no doubt…). All in all, everything’s a little delayed, but looking pretty good!
Puddle gauge
Ah, it’s really raining now… Still chilly, but wet! The jumbo rain gauge, entering its third season, is definitely a winner when it comes to recording in millimeters how much rain actually came down, BUT, the puddle on the path outside the Milkhouse front door is really the first line of rainfall appreciation. It’s amazing how heavy a downpour can look, sound and FEEL, without delivering much water at all. But the puddle doesn’t lie. It takes about a half inch (12mm) of rain within a few hours for it to even show up, so once it’s there, you know it’s good times for growing… No numbers to process, just…RAIN!
Freezing rain
You hear quite a lot of “freezing rain” warnings over the course a year around here, but it’s something you seldom actually SEE. If you’re driving, it means treacherous invisible ice on the roads. Otherwise, it seems like…rain. This morning, the freezing rain was a little more interesting, a fairly fine, steady drizzle that more or less froze to most surfaces on contact, coating them with ice. Here’s how it looked through the glass window of the east-facing greenhouse door. Outside, that’s the farm stand (reflected, that’s me, hooded, and the hoophouse ribs)… If you’ve ever played with Photoshop, this is the REAL version of one of the basic special effects—except here you can’t play with the settings… ;) Kinda cool, and the sort of thing you pay attention to when you’re obsessively watching the weather forecasts, waiting for the rainy, cloudy cold snap to break (Tuesday?!) so the field can dry out, so you can get on with tilling, and seed those first PEAS already. Freezing rain!!!
Field appears
Finally, a bit of a change in the weather: several degrees above freezing and steady on-and-off light rain. Although the air has been cold for the last couple of weeks, the sun has been doing its thing, heating up any patches of open ground and slowly melting the snow away from underneath. So, just a little extra help, and we see ground in no time. This drawn-out melt-off means water is puddling everywhere, freezing and thawing overnights, gradually seeping in. I think this is a good thing: our clayey (clay-loam) soil, with its high water-holding capacity, will be saturated to the max, and hold water longer, well into spring, a good break for the first seeds in. This is my theory… Y’know, there’s an upside to almost everything!
More weather
This February, tiny farming for me is mostly about, inside, watching seedlings in a growing number of plug sheets under lights, and outside, watching the weather. In this zone, Feb is a little early for thinking about garden conditions. Well, “normally”, it would be. Now, given the increasingly erratic winter, I’m trying to figure out a new early season production strategy. Conceivably, end of March could be shockingly warm and the ground dry enough to work, and instead of just seeding early peas, I could try some super early field transplants. But then, what if winter happened to come back, not for a day or two of April snow, as sometimes happens, but for a week or two, with freezing temperatures. Early plantings could get killed off, and then I’d need a second set of seedlings! This is how I’m kinda starting to think, about trying to plant around the weather, take advantage of unpredictably good conditions, while expecting some weird bad turns as well. What do last and first average frost dates really mean, given the last five years? Is a 30-year local rainfall average still in any way a useful guideline? Am I…exaggerating? Two days ago, it was 40°F (5°C) and raining right through the night. I was sure the forecast for an even warmer Wednesday would come through to finish off another, fourth big melt-off. Instead, yesterday morning it did a sudden 180, froze up and dumped a ton of snow. Today, there are 7-8′ snowbanks all around the barnyard (from snow plowing). The once and future chickenhouse practically disappeared… ;) Will spring and summer be different from that?!