The garlic really pushed up in the freakishly summery end-of-winter days, already around 6″ high. Don’t recall exactly how far ahead they are—there may be pics on the blog from this time in past years, I haven’t checked—but this is pretty big early growth. I’ve been wondering about deer tucking in as they are about the greenest thing around at the moment, but it seems they’re not to the deer’s taste. And they’ve done fine through a couple of -5°C/23°F nights, and a bit of snow. So it’s so far looking good for the first crop up this season!
Veggies
Drip, drip, drip
This isn’t really winter. No-one around here has seen anything like this weather before. February around here means knee-deep in snow drifts. Deep freeze. Instead, it’s been…raining. The strange, roughly weekly cycle continues: a few days of cold and snow, then up goes the temperature again. Can’t say it is having a huge effect on me, though, because I’ve been mostly holed up for the last month. Soul searching, re-examining my life in tiny farming. Trying to put things in perspective… Well, not exactly. :) I’d love to do all that stuff (although it also sounds a little depressing), but I’m not really wired that way. How do you search your soul, I mean…where IS IT? Been reading a lot, and…online. Splitting wood and building fires when it does get cold enough. Gearing up for the new growing season by chilling out a bit now. Watching the weather…
Nothing like New Year’s Day!
The holidays are fine and all, but in recent years, I’ve liked New Year’s Day! This is the view to the left from the front door—the market garden is about a mile down that road. Our little stretch of winter-like weather is holding, but it’s supposed to warm up and rain a little later, so most of this snow will likely soon be gone. For now, a nice, white and wintry start to what I’m sure will be an interestin’ year all round. I’m up for it. Happy New Year!
Brrrr…
Suddenly, this morning, it’s cold! For this time of year, that’s a forecast of 4°C (39°F) all day, and -6°C (21°F) overnight. Brrrr… Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t even notice the leaves turning in their usual intense explosion of reds and yellows, this time around, the trees kinda just went bare with a minimum of flash, and here we are! Round about now, this is as good a day as any to pick as the end of the old season, start of the new farming year!
Parsnip root flashback
This harvested parsnip root only hints at the massive root systems that plants have down there. Mature parsnips can root down to 9 feet (2.7m), and spread up to 3′ (0.9m) in the top 10″ (25cm) of soil. Other garden veggies are generally as impressive in the root department. When we harvest, most of the delicate root network is torn off, and we only get to see the bigger, tougher parts, the taproot or the root ball. This pic is from an old post I ran into, a flashback to Oct. 2008: there’s more words and another long-rooted-parsnip pic at Root love! (The arm-and-hand model is Lynn.)
Patchy frost
[Fri, Sep 16, 2011] First frost wasn’t too bad at all, a patchy frost that hit the field lightly, and in some areas, hardly at all. Still, the row cover, over some beans, peppers, eggplant, and a couple of beds of cherry tomato, worked out well, the exposed plants in those areas did get mildly to quite well…toasted. In the pic, we have Dusky eggplant, under its thin layer of salvation. Raising the floating row cover with a few non-pointy sticks, so it’s not pressing on the leaves, is a good idea—moisture often collects where the leaves touch the cover, freezes, and can deliver some pretty severe leaf burn. But for mature plants at this point in the season, I usually don’t worry about that—it’s different with seedlngs at the other end—and just float on the cover and leave it at that!
Well-thinned carrots, growing well!
Checking in on the fairly massive time investment we made in thinning 800′ of late-planted Touchon carrots—and it’s paying off! Not that there was any doubt that thinning works, it’s just so…tedious. After laying down carrot seed thick (in other words, after using the Earthway seeder), we spent hours removing thousands of extra seedlings. Because these guys went in so late, I wanted to give ’em every shot at making the best of good weather and sizing up while they could. Now, the effect of 1″ (2.5 cm) spacing really shows. We still kept them pretty tight, thinning a few short stretches to 2″ (5 cm) for comparison, but mostly did them like this, aiming/hoping for a big yield of fairly slender full-size carrots towards the end of October. You can see, second from right, a little one that escaped. It may seem obvious, I’ve found appropriate spacing is easy to overlook or downplay. When you’ve actually seen the massive difference it usually makes, it’s hard to ignore! Think better seeder. :)