Tue, Jan 22, 2008 · Filed under The Farm
I suppose you could call these the dog days of winter! Our freakish week of warmth and melt-off are already faint memories, and this year, it seems like snow and cold have been around forever. January is an odd time for me on the tiny farm. Five years have gone by, and I’m still cruising on the original discovery that this is incredibly absorbing FUN, and there’s still a ways to go before the start-up is really done. Heading south for sun isn’t even at the back of mind. Ice fishing is only vaguely tempting. From what I’ve picked up, farming used to be a full-time, day-in-day-out kinda thing. Old school farmers generally had animals, which meant getting away from the farm was not really practical at any time. Of course, in recent decades, working off the farm became a necessity just to pay the bills. And now, the original farmers have all but vanished. Which leaves the new farmers, who I imagine are usually smaller and more specialized, and can treat farming as a seasonal thing if they like. For me, sticking to the farm seems only natural. Right now, I’m buried in bits of paperwork, reading, clipboards of jotted ideas, lists, notes, and it’s now time to set up the grow racks and start the first of the new seedlings. If the clouds and whiteness everywhere do get a little trying, here and there, well, it’s all part of farm living! And spring IS just around the corner!!
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Mon, Jan 14, 2008 · Filed under Planning, Winter
Here’s the new garden map, companion to the two calendars, all part of the latest version of my planning set-up. The simplicity and spareness are deceptive, this is the result of FIVE YEARS of refining complicated planning and record-keeping paperwork, stripping away stuff I didn’t really use. Really! My old maps were way more detailed, with varieties and planting dates for each bed, hand-printed in really tiny letters (each of those squares represents a 50′x50′ section containing 10 beds). The grid now takes up only half the page, leaving lots of room for little notes, and the sections are just big enough for blocking in the crops (varieties, dates and bed locations go on a separate list). It’s not fully filled in yet, and everything’s in pencil for easy rearranging. I was working on it today along with the seed order list, and took it for a walk to take the pic. Pretty plain on paper, but when I look at it, I see the whole season unfolding… (Overnight last night, the snow suddenly came back!)
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Wed, Jan 09, 2008 · Filed under Fieldwork, Veggies, Winter
Happily expecting heat, I stepped out into a sharp, nasty wind this morning. The weather’s taken a downward turn from the cheery short-term forecast. It’s still going to be above zero for the next couple of days, They say, but just, and the nights have plummeted below. Also, in the 15-day, that follow-up warm spell predicted for 10 days from now has evaporated. All this meaning: harvest and mulch now! Unfortunately, the heavy wind makes grass mulching nearly futile (the mulch blows away), so I’ve put it all off till tomorrow…
A last hold-out of snow is melting off a section of spinach. While the color is a bit odd, with two distinct shades of green going on (cold effects!), the taste and texture are good. Spinach lives in these conditions, so as long as the leaves haven’t been battered by cold wind, they’re still good eating. Just sort! More »
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Tue, Jan 08, 2008 · Filed under Fieldwork, Veggies, Winter
After a night of rain and 50°F (10°C) warmth, the field is just about clear. What a difference a couple of days can make… I took a walk. The ground isn’t even frozen—with the odd way all that snow came before a real cooling down period, the ground was insulated by the snow and didn’t freeze too deeply. It’s quite strange. Usually, during the March end-of-winter melt-off, the clayey soil is wet, sticky, mucky, sucking, and the drainage is slower as the frozen ground thaws out, but now, some areas are dry enough to till! The scene also looks quite differen—greener!—than in previous years, because I’ve left a lot of cover crops (oats, bit of rye), and there were quite of few beds of late harvest veggies caught in the first snow. There’s potentially good stuff out there: huge carrots, beets, spinach. They may be too cold-damaged to be worth a harvest, I’ll check ‘em out tomorrow. And the unmulched garlic is doing fine! More »
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Mon, Jan 07, 2008 · Filed under The Farm, Winter
The big melt-off is well underway. The weather is not scary, it’s not like a violent storm, we’re wired to appreciate the warmth, but my body knows this is rather strange. A heavy, swirling mist has been everywhere since yesterday afternoon. The temperature remained steady in the 40′s (F, that’s 5°C+) right through the night. Ground is rapidly breaking through the snow cover, which was 1′-2′ (30-60cm) across the garden field. The fog effect is always nice: just about everything looks mysterious and cool, like the nearly dead black locust tree in the farmhouse front yard (actually, that tree always looks good)…
The snow is seriously…receding.
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Sun, Jan 06, 2008 · Filed under Winter
Today, another weird weather reminder, and something I haven’t really noticed or thought about in years: slush. Road slush, in particular. Today’s sudden warmth—it’s near 50°F (10°C)—melted water into the abundant snow (snowbanks help), and there you have it: heavy, wet, cold, and sludgy slush! Ready to splatter! On the roads, it’s an unappetizing brownish-gray as the road dirt is churned in by traffic—this is a nice example at the top of the village hill. If you’ve lived in a snowy northern city, where drainage is only as good as the sewage system and cars are everywhere, you’ll know slush build-up as quite the little menace. Getting properly splattered by speeding vehicles is so much more…thorough than the average puddle splashing. Especially when you get it in the face… Here in farm country, cars and trucks are way more respectful of the people walking down the road (as I do every day)—at least, they are on the side roads—and with the shrinking winters (this one so far excepted) and full ditch drainage, you just don’t notice slush too often. We haven’t had slushable amounts of snow in a while. The next few days ought to be interesting. As predicted (this time, they were right), the days AND nights are WARM until, it seems, Friday. Two winters in one?
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