Lettuce seedlings get their first taste of full-on springtime sunshine. Next stop, into the ground in the greenhouse. I wouldn’t call this hardening off, some of these are being transplanted later today—tomorrow’s cloudy forecast should give them all the post-transplant adjustment break they need, then bring on the sun! (Starring in this pic, always reliable Black Seeded Simpson.)
Veggies
First winter harvest
Yesterday’s harvest that went to today’s farmers’ market, my earliest market start by almost two months! From the unheated greenhouse: kale, green and red mustard, and lettuce mix times two. Harvest conditions: -2°C outside, a perfect-working-weather 10°C inside. At the end, the sun came out and it started to get sweatingly hot under a T-shirt, shirt and fleece. But, already done! No rinsing, just covered and into a cool room for a 6 a.m. pick-up this morning. It felt a little odd, starting the year’s Saturday markets so early, and indoors—this fall, if all goes as intended, weekly market will cease to end for winter and become instead a fully year-round thing…
Winter salad
This bowl of lettuces and kale is the first cut of spring, taken from the unheated greenhouse while snow flurries whip around outside. With the help of 6 mils of plastic and some row cover, the salad easily survived three months of winter, with temperatures that went down to -30°C (-22°F). The texture and color are good, the taste, deliciously bold. Fantastic! The flowers are bok choi that managed to bolt in the alternating warmth and cold—on sunny days, the hoophouse temperature could easily reach 10-15°C (50-59°F), even when it was sub-zero outside. Interesting!
Post-winter greens
The covers are off and it’s all shades of green! That’s about three months, left to their own devices, living through freezing nights, often around -20°C (-4°F), and a low of -32°C (-25.6°F), under a couple of layers of medium-weight row cover, which means, little light (with the plastic added in, somewhere around 50% of already weak winter sun). Inside, at ground level outside the row cover, the lowest it got on the coldest night was an amazingly not-so-chilly-at-all -13°C (8.6°F). As a simple survival test…excellent!
Stored carrots for stew
Long-term veggie storage can get fairly involved, with root cellars, sticking things in piles of sand, adjusting humidity, spotting and culling the spoiled, that sort of thing, or it can be as simple as tossing a plastic bag of small carrots, little guys that wound up at the bottom of an empty market bin, into the fridge’s crisper drawer, and forgetting about them until they’re found four months later while rooting around for ingredients for stew. These carrots represent exactly the latter, a few handfuls of Nelson (orange), Red Samurai, and Purple Sun. They’re in perfect shape, crunchy and tasty—the plastic bag maintains the humidity that keeps them hard—so a quick rinse, chop-chop, and in they go. (They’re partly cut because I’d already started slicing them when I decided to take a pic.) Another whatever-veg-is-around beef stew. What could be simpler?!
Seed catalog, 2016
Here’s my main seed catalog for this year. Once again, unlike several seasons ago, when I’d receive a dozen catalogs, order from two main suppliers, and pick up a few things from two or three others, lately, I’ve simplified and get everything in one place. This year, though, and for the second year in a row, there was a crop failure on a variety of mustard that I grow, and no close substitute, so I had to look elsewhere. Which, of course, opened up a world I’d kinda forgotten, the wonderful world of price comparison shopping.
The puzzling thing about pricing is the seemingly bizarre differences in price for the same items between different sources (it’s the same in seed as everywhere else). Some suppliers are clearly overall more expensive than others, so if quality and service are fine, it’s easy to go with the savings. But then, on any one item, prices can vary quite dramatically either way. For example, I found the same variety of mustard at $10 and $17 a pound, and something similar at $50, at three different places, and that’s expected. Less so is that, for just one common variety of lettuce, it’s $33 at my usual place, where the same amount is only $19 at a usually more expensive other supplier.
Yep, I could’ve gone on and on like this, with multiple lists and endless tabs of online catalog pages, like a full-on coupon clipper, looking for the ultimate bottom line big score. Instead, though, I ordered my mustard and stopped! Maybe not the best every-last-penny business thinking for a tiny farm, and tiny farm definitely does not equal big budget, but sometimes at least, for a few bucks, life is too short! :)
Sundown in the hoophouse
Not your typical postcard sunset, and it’s kinda chilly, damp and mucky in here, even as the temperature outside slides down to an overnight -15°C (5°F). But it’s all about the greens, tucked under a couple of layers of row cover, maybe not exactly cozy with only ground heat to keep them warm—who knows how they’re really feeling—still, well-set to survive another sub-zero night. With that in mind, sundown through 6 mil plastic is a cheery-enough sight to see!