Sat, Apr 05, 2008 · Filed under Harvest, Seed starting, Spring, Veggies
Man, what a difference a day and a bunch of degrees can make! The temperature didn’t exactly shoot up, but it went from hovering around daytime zero, to around 10°C (50°F). This was one weather trend, predicted on the 15-day-forecast weather site, that I figured wouldn’t suddenly go south (it’s gotta warm up sometime), so I’ve been waiting for it, to the day, for a couple of days now. It’ll get steadily warmer for a week or so, than maybe drop a bit, but even if we get another BLIZZARD, the ground will have warmed up enough that new snow won’t be able to stick around for long. So, I do believe, SPRING IS HERE!!! I woke up to sunshine, and without even checking the temperature or confirming the forecast, set up a table outside the Milkhouse and out went the leek, onions and parsley for a little rapid hardening off. Getting them out to the greenhouse in a couple of days will free up a lot of rack space! Wandering around the field a bit, checking the melt-off’s progress, I poked around the edge of the Jerusalem artichoke bed. The ground was still fairly frozen, and had melted to clayey muck only in spots. Poking around in a soft spot at the base of one of the plants, I came up with a handful! First harvest! The tubers look beautiful, the ones in the front of the pic about marble size, the biggest in the back, like a golf ball. As seed stock, there’s going to be a ton from the 45 pieces planted last year. I didn’t end up harvesting any in the fall; now, I’ll get to for the first time eat ‘em!
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Thu, Mar 20, 2008 · Filed under Spring
“Spring begins” is what it says on my calendar. In the field, there’s a foot or two of snow everywhere that’s flat, with piled high snow banks and deep drifts wherever possible. The sun is getting higher and hotter by the day, but the air’s stayed cold to freezing. Today looked a lot different than this time last year, but not so far off from late March 2006. Nothing a couple of warm days and some rain won’t fix. Predictions are for a drawn out wind down to winter around here, but I’m expecting anything and imagining a warm and sunny early spring…starting any day now. As usual, we shall see!
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Mon, Mar 17, 2008 · Filed under Greenhouse, Seed starting, Veggies, Winter
Last night, the greenhouse low was a chilly 5°F (-15°C): the arugula, spending nights under 3-4 layers of floating row cover, still seems to be doing fine. Especially with more extreme transplants like this—a long time in the plug sheet, then an abrupt jump to the harsh greenhouse conditions—there’s a critical period of a few days, waiting for the stressed little plants to settle in. Cover at night, uncover in the morning, till the weather warms up…
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Tue, Mar 11, 2008 · Filed under Fieldwork, Greenhouse, Winter
As far as winter irrigation in the greenhouse goes, melting snow in big barrels is the next best thing to a really long hose, a well and an electric pump. Fill ‘em up, cover with clear plastic, wait a day (even on a dull, cloudy day, it gets up to 60°F in the hoophouse). Repeat a couple of times, and you have 50 gallons of rainwater in a barrel! The alternative is dragging 200′ of hose through deep snow from the barn to the greenhouse, then reeling it in and draining it, every couple of days. The weather has put the kibosh on the early-March, barely heated greenhouse plan, the happy prospect until March actually came around. The nights have been regularly plunging to 10°F (-12°C), so it’s really not worthwhile to heat things up by 25°F. No worries. Adjusting expectations and schedules more or less by the day is all part of the fun… It’s never boring!
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Sun, Mar 09, 2008 · Filed under Greenhouse, Winter
Another snowstorm, come and gone. It snowed steadily all of yesterday, with pretty high winds, but most of the accumulation seemed to be overnight. Today, azure skies, brilliant sun, tons of snow in drifts piled high. Looks like we’re one more heavy fall away from all-time records. I heard there’ve been over a dozen school snow days, compared to three or four a season in recent years. Here on the farm, no extreme hardship so far (knock on wood!). In the barnyard, we’re running out of room around the edges to pile up more snow, and in the field, it’s a couple of feet deep, but snow has kept off the Milkhouse roof, and the main worry, a flattened hoophouse, hasn’t come close to happening. The wind built up the drift on the south side (both photos), and just to be safe (and for the first time ever), I scooped off the new stuff, down to the harder-packed, more permanent base. Luckily, the side walls are inflated (a fan on a looong extension cord continually blows air between two layers of plastic), so the surface is quite taut and doesn’t sag or hold snow easily. And that’s it. Back to waiting for the snow to go…
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Tue, Mar 04, 2008 · Filed under Animals, Planning, Seed starting, Winter
Mainly mucking about today. Visited with the goats. Around 15 of ‘em. These girls upfront are the current kingpins of the goat yard. Goats have their pecking order (just like the chickens to come!), which mainly means a few get first crack at food, or crowding at the fence, or whatever else they all want to do, while the rest back away and wait or get butted. It’s mostly rank by size, but a vicious streak counts, too. The one in the middle is on top now (with her friend on the right), the brown pair on the left (the Evil Twins), used to be a vicious tag team running the yard, but they lost their edge. Not that they’re always fighting, a brief burst of deterrent action goes a long way. It’s like a soap opera if you watch ‘em every day. Goats…
Every year, this little period in the first half of March is kinda like waiting for the starting gun. I’m full of energy and waiting on the weather. A little EDGY. All the early starts are now under lights: onions (first time from seed), celery (another first), more leek and parsley, plus the stuff started around the end of January (leek, parsley, rosemary, arugula, lettuce). It’s another week to the peppers and eggplant, and then the grow racks will start to get full, and I’m also holding off till then to transplant the early lettuce to the greenhouse. As soon as the snow clears and the temperature warms up a bit, there’s outdoor fix-it work, starting with an old ice fishing hut to turn into a home for the composting toilet (an outhouse for the field!) and the chickenhouse to renovate. There’s a list. Plus a lot of garden clean-up, crops left over winter, that should be pulled as soon as I can. MEANWHILE, I’m waiting…
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