The frost warning for last night didn’t come to anything, but it’s on again for tonight. Yesterday, we covered about 500 tomatoes, some of the peppers, eggplant, and beans, and even the basil. I don’t really think there’ll be a deadly hard frost, so this is only partial insurance. Covering half the field seemed a little much. Here, the tomatoes are somewhat safer than if they were exposed, but the delicate tops are taking a beating from the cover, and if it does freeze up, frozen dew on the row cover fabric will toast the parts of the plants directly in contact. It’s a rough little bit of weather insurance. It’ll be great to have it over tomorrow. Cross fingers!
Weather
Working in the rain
The rain is good (15mm over the last day), the chill (there’s a frost warning for tonight and tomorrow) and sticky clay-loam mud are not so good. But the calendar is flipping and there’s really no time to take shelter. Conall puts in plastic mulch for melons, anchoring it every few feet by scooping out soil, pushing down the plastic, and replacing the soil. We’ll cut X’s to transplant into, and water by hand around each plant as necessary. Labor-intensive, but it’s the most reasonable way to decent melons I’ve found so far, and it worked out well two years ago. After experimenting with straw mulch for tomatoes and melons last year, I’m back to using plastic for melons, and that’s it. Straw is great, but the extra work of spreading and then the fall clean-up seemed like stretching it for everything else that has to be done this year.
After the rain…
After a rain, it’s easy to see exactly how much work is ahead in the organic field! The dark wet soil and the flat light of a cloudy day make every detail stand out: weeds exploding, dense rows that’ll need thinning (thanks to the generous Earthway seeder), rocks to get in the way of hoes and tiller both. But it’s usually better than it looks. Here, the Horse tiller can be walked up each path in about a minute. Thinning the beets (first two beds on the right) is actually a harvest of excellent beet greens. The rocks, well, the bigger ones just have to be picked. The worst is in-row weeding, for stuff right in with the crops. This has to be done mostly by hand, but if you get the worst spots, the veggies soon grow to where they can more or less fend for themselves, shading out new weed growth. Or the crop is soon finished (like spinach, on the left) and the whole bed can be tilled up. With a little thoughtfully directed labor, it all works out! (We got 15mm (3/5″) of rain… Not bad.)
Spring rain
Finally, not a moment too soon, 40mm (1.6″) of gentle rain over the last day and a half, with likely a little more to come. Slow and intermittent is best for soaking in. This is great. Things were starting to get really dry: over the last week, I had to fire up the pond pump and (inefficient!) sprinklers to help along the just emerging and newly seeded beds. Now, we’re good for better than a week, for some of the crops at this stage, even two (the clay-loam is great at holding moisture). Some days, gloomy is good!
More hands on deck
Conall, the all-new organic grower, is back after being unexpectedly called away two and a half weeks ago. That happened after we’d worked together for seven days straight. For me, making the transition from essentially solo tiny farming to having regular help was that quick. Having everything bouncing around in your head, with little need to explain it, is a luxury and efficiency of sorts. On the other hand, if you have people who you can sync with, sharing the gardening in an ongoing way seems like even more fun. And you can grow MORE STUFF with LESS WEEDS!! :) It’s a really welcome return. FREAK FROST: Three nights ago, according to the min/max thermometer, the temperature bottomed at a little below 0°C (and there was no reported cold snap or hard killing frost), but some of the brassicas (Brussels sprouts—see the whitish spots on the leaves on the right of the pic, bok choi, cauliflower) and two out of three varieties of peas got fairly toasted, burnt by the cold. Many of the pea leaves were totally killed off. I only noticed the extent of the brassica damage when we took off the row cover today. This is something I’ve never seen, and Bob, with 40 years of farming, hadn’t either, especially with peas, which can grow in the snow. The additionally odd thing is that some varieties (one of the peas, broccoli) weren’t affected at all. These are all plants that can normally take an overnight freezing and bounce back no problem—temperatures around zero should be nothing. Weird. My random theory: a very rapid temperature drop, many degrees in a few minutes, that didn’t give the plants enough time to adjust…? Anyhow, everything’s recovering just fine! The crazy weather effects continue…
Let’s take a look
The latest View. The weather’s been warm and sunny for the past few days, but the nights mainly cold, often drifting down to zero C and a bit below. No rain, and the ground’s getting dry. Finally got round to cutting the grass (no more soaked feet in the morning). The white pails all about are for the spring cleaning of rocks pushed up over winter. Nothing green in the way of crops to see from up here, but just about everything seeded so far has emerged. Overall, nice!
O, the luxury!
No sooner fixed than in the field! This combo of little riding mower and old snowmobile trailer is possibly my favorite tiny farming tool, a decadent* alternative to walking up and down the garden plot.
Around here, you can walk miles in a day, especially if you forget things and have to go back—although, walking around, taking different routes each time to check stuff out, is one of the big pleasures, too… What a simple life. :)
Anyhow, after trying a couple of different garden utility belts, overalls with 50 pockets, and a pull-along garden cart, nothing has come close to being able to toss all the stuff you need onto the trailer and go.
I use it whenever there’s too much to carry. Here, I’ve just finished the second seeding of mesclun and spinach, four beds each (on the trailer: Earthway seeders with plates in the coffee can, my most used rake, measuring tape and stakes for marking new beds, a pail for rocks, and seed in the green trug; the empty trays just happen to be there).
Up until I took this pic, it was a gloriously sunny day, after three days or so of cloud and drizzle (which added up to 20cm of rain). Little luxuries.
*The mower is actually pretty energy efficient: it uses maybe 30 gallons (114 l) of gas in an entire season, and that includes mowing paths and hauling harvests.