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!
