The grow racks are starting to fill up. First trays of eggplant and peppers, seeded yesterday, sit up top where it’s warmest. The lights run 14-hours a day, on a timer, with an extra hour or so of early morning ambient sunlight from windows on three sides of the room.
Year: 2007
Monitoring spring melt-off
When the base layer of ice and snow finally slides off the roof of the barn, Spring Melt-off is truly underway! This sheltered east-facing roof is the official monitoring device. Without much snow build-up this winter, the satisfying crash of massive slabs falling 40 feet to the ground was absent. Still, a good deal of icy snow cleared in the last 24 hours, and warm weather is forecast for the next few days at least. Excellent! (Guest snapshot by C.)
Profusion of parsley
Parsley has been in trays for just over three weeks now. Like everything under fluorescents, they stretch, but do fine when eventually they make it out to the real light. So far this year, two varieties, Green River curly and a flat-leaf Italian (definitely stronger and more flavorful than the curly types). There are around 70 cells of each, some with two or three plants, others with just one. Potted up into three-plant bunches, there should be about 50 of each going into the ground in late April-early May.
Melting from the edges
This is the fourth day of steadily rising above-zero daytime temperature, and melt-off is well underway. It’s a messy time of year underfoot, and totally fun. Here at the gate to the garden field, you can see it melting down from the edges.
Checking on the garlic
Today was the first walk around of the field of the year! The ground is still mostly frozen, but some spots have melted into a thick clayey muck that’ll take a while to dry out. So, you stick to the hard spots. Here, the fall-planted garlic beds are showing up. The row markers are there to prevent tilling accidents. The straw mulch is supposed to protect the cloves from heaving up during any quick freezing and thawing, by evening out the soil temperature (I doubt that would happen in this soil, it’s a just-in-case). The mulch does keep down weeds and hold in moisture during the spring and early summer, which alone is worth it. Garlic will be the first in-field veggie greenery of the season…if all has gone well.
Eggplant emerges
A tray of Fairy Tale eggplant suddenly begins to break out after six days under plastic wrap. In just a week or two, I won’t have time for this sort of…intense observation, watching for the very first signs of emerging seedlings. In a month, there will be a couple of thousand to keep track of. The micro-view is fun for now!
Progress…
Here it is on a gloomy evening after a few days of meltdown. A cold snap with a couple of inches of snow is forecast, and then, it’s back to the warming by the middle of next week. So the weatherpeople say.