Tiny Farm Blog Organic micro-farming with two acres and some tools ~ a daily photo journal...

Looks pretty good from here, the bottom end of the field is well-prepped and partially seeded, but the weather is COLD. As forecast, this time, the cold snap arrived Sunday, and we’re now treated to daytime temperatures around 5°C (40°F) or lower, and, after the incredibly warm last couple of weeks, what seem like FRIGID nights going down to -7°C (20°F). Seedlings are piling up in the Milkhouse, but I’m waiting until the cold breaks, which should be around Friday, to start moving things out to the greenhouse. On top of the usual everything-to-do-at-once of April-May, the late melt-off followed by instant mid-summer weather were a little disorienting, and germination of the early direct-seeded crops is SLOW, first hindered by the dryness, now, not helped at all by the sudden cold… Next, I still haven’t settled plans for help this season (people in the field!), which makes a BIG…psychological difference, head space, whatever, it’s harder to focus when you can’t even estimate what will get done each precious day. There’s quite a line-up of potential volunteers, and one person coming later in the week to check things out who may stay on for the season, but it’s all UP IN THE AIR until it’s happening. And these are the few weeks that largely set the quality of the entire season… So, the Almost Overwhelming days are in particularly fine form this year… Of course, take a deep breath, think about it, and really, what’s to worry: tiny farming is all about long odds and doing the improbable… That sounds kinda cool to me! :)

Many things are going on at once, and one of them is potting up seedlings and moving them out to the greenhouse. Already, onions, leek, parsley, lettuce, and the first trays of cauliflower and broccoli are out there, all of them hardy enough to take whatever cold comes along. What’s really going to use up space once they’re potted up are the tender tomatoes, peppers and eggplant. I’d like to’ve had them all done by now, BUT, there’s going to be a cold snap for 4-5 days starting early next week, a couple of nights may go down as low as -8°C (18°F), and I’m concerned that row cover and the kerosene heater may not be enough protection in the unheated greenhouse. So I’m waiting, potting up a few every day and finding room for them under the lights. I started with the Chosen 100, my earliest 100 tomato starts, 25 each of Big Beef (above), Juliet, Striped German and Stupice (in order, two hybrids and two open pollinated heirlooms). They’ve gone into 3″ peat pots, with a mix of peat, compost and soil, and I’m also hardening them off outside. The rest of the toms were started a couple of weeks later. They’ll move from 72- to 38-cell trays, all part of the spend-less-time-on-transplants experiments… Waiting on weather forecasts is a bit of a risky way to work, it’s really not a good idea to delay anything at this point in the year, I’ve found it’s generally better to get on with things and deal with problems as they come up, not try to second guess the future. But I have so much else to do, I’ll take the chance and wait a couple more days to finish them all…

The garlic is looking great, here in unusual shades of green thanks to a bright yellow sunset. They’re doing pretty much the same as this time last year, and the year before. I read somewhere that garlic reproduction from cloves is cloning, so the garlic we’re eating now is genetically identical to the original varieties from thousands of years ago. Dunno, sounds cool and kinda reassuring, even our weird weather doesn’t seem to affect these guys. Gazing over the garlic patch on a warm evening after a satisfying day in the field, it’s almost enough to make me believe that all’s right with the world, and Blue Fox Farm’s motto, “Farming like there’s a tomorrow” (it’s been running through my head all spring), is just amusingly paranoid wordplay. Maybe… And then I think about filling up the tiny tractor (diesel just hit $1.25 a liter, that’s $4.70 a US gallon, good thing I don’t use much…), and the bizarre weather (from mid-summer conditions in mid-spring, we’re plunging back to way subzero nights in a couple of days), and, well…it’s good to be working in the garden, and the garlic looks great! :)

The weather’s been warm, sunny, essentially FANTASTIC for the last couple of days, and the forecast for the next few looks just as good. Indoors, many of the earliest seedling starts are putting on growth spurts, quite suddenly crowding each other and grabbing for the light, like these Gypsy sweet peppers. That means hundreds of seedlings have to be potted up, hardened off a bit, and headed out to the greenhouse, NOW—it’s not good to constrain their growth in small cells, and once they’re in bigger quarters, there isn’t room for them all under the lights. It’s no coincidence that, just as you’re driven to seed a dozen crops into the field RIGHT AWAY, the transplants are ALSO blowing up and demanding immediate attention—it’s the miracle of the garden plan working. They’ve been timed to be at this stage right about now. This is the way it goes. I’m so completely swamped with things to do, not just planting, but building and repairing things, working on the new farmers’ market stand, setting up the irrigation, and on and on. It can be quite overwhelming. Often, it doesn’t seem possible to get it all done in reasonable time. But you plug away—if you’ve done it before, you can do it again!—and eventually things ease up, and you get to survey your first crops setting up in the field—not to mention, EAT STUFF, like a perfectly crunchy spring radish…just brush off the dirt—and at that point, the deep feeling of satisfaction and simple happiness at having done it all is really, truly, have-to-experience-it excellent. MEANWHILE, that’s a good six weeks away, and until then, it’s the full-on SPRING RUSH! :)

A couple of days ago, I moved out four trays from the Milkhouse to the greenhouse: parsley, leek, onion, leek. I made a quick frame to keep the row cover off the alliums. Although it’s been just below zero for the last couple of nights, they probably didn’t need the protection. They’re doing fine. All around, it may look a bit of a mess, but everything is actually sorted out and ready to be put away… Soon. Everything seems to be going in slow motion lately. Maybe it’s the extra attention from blogging—writing about waiting and reading about waiting—that makes all of this waiting on the next turn of the weather seem so painfully slow. And right now, there’s LOTS to do… Life imitates blog? :)

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!

The main tiny farming action is with the seedlings now; even if the snow melted off tomorrow (which it won’t), it’d still take a sunny, windy couple of weeks, give or take, for the field to dry out enough to fully work. Indoors, with the new grow rack, there is still space, but there’s also quite a bit left to be started, including most of the tomatoes. And some of the seedlings are beginning to call out for MORE ROOM. The rosemary (above) did really well, germinating steadily over several weeks, to the point where there are up to four and five crowded in 1.5″ (3.75cm) diameter cells. And the celeriac (celery root; below), a trial crop this year and the only one started in flats not cells (I sprinkled a packet of seed across two fibre trays), is healthy, dense and stretching. Transplanting tiny seedlings is fun at first few, but can get tedious, especially if you have hundreds to do in a session. To save on time and tedium, I try to avoid potting up by sowing into final locations whenever it makes sense. One way or another, the trays inevitably start adding up, until there’s not enough LIGHT to go around. Into the equation, there’s the barely heated seedling greenhouse and the WEATHER: as soon as it’s reasonably warm enough at night, I can move the hardier stuff out—this month, at least every other night has dropped down to around 5°F (-15°C)… And that’s what this stage of the action is all about: adjusting lighting, timing and starting cell size and, as always, gambling on the weather…!

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!

Seedling production is on about the same schedule as last year, except there are a few new things on the go: celery, onions, leek, celeriac. The three grow racks aren’t yet full (and there’s a fourth to build), but all that will change in a couple of days, when peppers and eggplant start. This is also when gambling on the weather begins, which at this point affects when I choose to start certain crops. Already, based on the 15-day forecast, it looks like a much colder March ahead than in the last couple of years, and with all the snow cover, a quick thaw towards the end of the month will still mean a few extra days of drying out time. And then there’s April to “consider”—it’s all basically pure guessing, colored by a little wishful thinking. IF there’s gonna be cold and snow for a good part of April, early transplanting will be delayed. So, starting some things in a couple of days, or in a week, or in two weeks, could make a fair bit of difference. If I have to hold things for an extra 2-3 weeks, there won’t be room under the lights as I start more, and out in the greenhouse, given real sun, growth will be quicker and the seedlings will get crowded. And so on, tons of little calculations and gambles… Nothing is THAT critical, but a little more work here, a little crop slowdown there, it all adds up. I enjoy this, juggling increments in the face of the weather, but it could drive some people into quite a state! :)