The first fine day of the all-new year! Not as wintry as it might be in the Great White North. Guess I’ve gotten used to the new winters: a few days of any sort of weather, then a complete change. But I still remember…snowbanks. We adapt!
Weather
March field peek
An early spring look at the field, as the snow recedes and the soil takes over. This is the exact moment when the new season begins for me. Seedlings are already growing indoors, planting plans put to paper, things are underway. Still, it only all makes sense out here, with the musty wet smell of decayed vegetation, my boots sinking into the sticky clay mud, wondering when it will dry out enough to work. I see the single strand of electric fence, all that stands between garden and pillaging deer, stayed up! (You can see part of it strung between the gate posts.) Some winters it falls and critters chew through it in a spot or two. Not having to fix it means one less thing to do!
January snow
The new year’s view. Snow from week to week in winter is practically a 50-50 proposition in recent years. Go back a couple of decades, though, when weather was more regular and predictable, and this is what it was like around here for four or five months solid. The snow got deeper, the drifts piled higher, as winter wore on. It’s the exact opposite of veggies growing in a field!
October harvest
Great weather into the first week of October, with no hard frost so far. The veggie harvest list: beets, carrots, peppers, garlic, onion, green onion, zucchini, spinach, kale, lettuce, cabbage, butternut squash, radicchio, broccoli, eggplant. Nice!
Summer ends!
For the last day of summer, a rainbow! The field is looking a bit bedraggled, with some things naturally dying out, some touched by near-freezing overnights, with tender crops row-covered against the possibility of a hard frost. Besides the rainbow, it’s not the postcard look of mid-summer, but what matters most, everything is still producing well!
Seed in the field
Pretty drab view of an empty patch on a partly cloudy day, but there’s new seed under there! Spinach, radish, peas, beets, green onion, lettuce, went in a few days back, perfectly timed for the last couple of days of slow, steady rain to get them started. You can see the faint lines of the seeder. (In front, mulched with straw, this year’s garlic is coming along well.) Rain also exposes the many stones and pebbles in this ground. Thousands have been cleared away, and they keep pushing up. It may look like a lot, but they’re not a problem. Live and…let be rocks!
First up: garlic!
Clear away some straw and there it is, a garlic shoot pushing its way up to the light! It’s the first sign of new veggie growth in the field this season. Garlic planting happens in the fall. It spreads its roots for a while, goes dormant for the winter when the ground freezes, and wakes as the weather warms. That’s what the books say. Whatever it’s doing in the frozen ground is fine by me, as long as it shows up for spring. Which it always has. It’s been…reliable!