The first official rain of the gardening season happened overnight, an unimpressive 3mm or so. I suppose I shouldn’t sneer at ANY rain… Still, it’s hardly enough to do anything but help along the pigweed. On the positive side, it’s a start!
Weather
Potting up
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…
Garlic the Reliable
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! :)
How odd…
It’s like we’ve gone directly from winter to summer. Less than a WEEK since the ground dried out enough to walk on it and till it, I’m actually out there WATERING… This is really odd.
I’m sure we’ve had unseasonably hot Aprils before, where watering in newly seeded crops was necessary, still, it’s only common sense to chalk this up as another of the consistently bizarre weather events we’ve been having in the last three years or so… In other words: global warming, I guess.
“Normally,” April is a good month once it warms up, because our rather heavy clay-loam soil holds moisture well, and just post-snow, it’s wet enough that you don’t have to water in what you’ve seeded. A spring bonus!
Instead, what’s going on here is, in a handful of days, the top inch or more of the ground has dried out completely in the unusual heat. That means shallowly-sown seed, like spinach, lettuce, radish, beets, and chard, is sitting in perfectly dry soil.
I put in peas at around 1.5″ (4.25cm), and they were just barely in nice, moist earth. But these other guys, what can I do?
I considered setting the seeder deeper, but that could just bury them too far for good, quick germination (I’ve messed around with too deep before…).
Or, out with the sprinkler.
I don’t like using sprinklers, I don’t have water to waste, but here, it’s much the more reasonable alternative to hand-watering a 50’x100′ area, when there’s so much else to do.
The pond irrigation isn’t yet set up, so the water’s coming from the barn well, where there’s such low pressure that only the cheapest, most lightweight garden sprinkler will oscillate, where better quality, heavier duty ones shoot a stream of water straight ahead and won’t budge.
Irrigation comes early, and cheap gear is every once in a while…good!
Seedlings don’t wait around!
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! :)
Head out on the highway…
A couple of days ago, things seemed to be moving in slow motion, today, it’s the wide open highway! (A poor analogy, perhaps, given the soaring price of gas, but anyway…) Sitting at the wheel of the little riding mower, heading to the greenhouse down the main path with trays of seedlings in tow, a warm sun shining down, a good part of the field just about ready to work, all the possibility of a brand new garden season ahead, and no weeds in sight felt…really fantastic. With a nice adrenaline rush!
As the warm weather kicks in, there’s a whole series of winter-to-summer changes, and my body memory of fieldwork details starts to come back. It’s not like I’ve been doing this forever, each new season, there’s a spring ramp up of remembering routines, pathways, ways to do a thousand little things.
Last week, I moved the Kubota compact tractor and the riding mower out of winter parking in the drive shed, to make room for summer storage. The greenhouse is now almost completely set-up for full seedling mode. Today, I test started the Horse walking rototiller and walked it around, set out the rain gauge, stripped off the draft-sealing duct tape to open the Milkhouse side door (a milestone spring moment!), and hooked up the hose from the barn well to the pipe that runs down the field and supplies the greenhouse (the hose goes through one of the holes at the bottom left of the door). Practically overnight, there is SO MUCH TO DO, RIGHT AWAY. There’s tons of tilling as soon as possible so the cover crop residue can start breaking down, and immediate seeding of, at least, peas and spinach, in the next couple of days of sunny weather, before the big rain forecast for Friday and the weekend. And CHICKENS should be here tomorrow… Fun!
Hanging in the greenhouse
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? :)