The muddy brown look of spring is here. Doesn’t mean we won’t be back under mountains of snow before it’s gone for good. But the sun is getting warmer and the days longer. Once again!
Weather
A blanket of fresh new snow
The weather app was right: more snow! Fresh new snow piled high never fails to make me wonder what it must be like to see this stuff for the very first time…
On a snowed-under mid-winter day, pictures of veggies growing in the field don’t come to mind. Except, I do like thinking about the fall-planted garlic, tucked under a layer of straw, biding its time.
The only other overwintering crop out there is Jerusalem artichoke. Rather than dig it all up in fall and replant in spring, lately I’ve been leaving a good amount to come back on its own. The chokes can fend for themselves.
Early look at a new season
An unusual absence of snow in this early look at the field. The end of the compost pile poking into the photo is color-coordinated with the spring browns of all the dead vegetation. Center and right, a good amount of the market garden area is pretilled—clear and near set to go. In the mid distance, the little greenhouse is still standing, while the big guy is still bare, having had its plastic savagely ripped open by unusually high winds. That white object is a round bale of straw, sheathed in protective plastic, ready to use as mulch. It’s the broad canvas for another new growing season!
Won’t give in to the cold
Lettuce, under a hoop-supported layer of medium weight row cover in the unheated greenhouse, is crisp, colorful, and fresh as daisies. This lettuce mix was planted in October, and some of it cut once in December, and now it’s waiting out the winter. Outside low so far: not bad, around -22°C. Kind of the same picture every time – dead or alive – but still always exciting when you’re there… (:
Winter farming in a nutshell
Winter farming in a nutshell: Sundown, New Year’s Day 2017, checking up on the greenhouse after a rattler of a windy night. The snowdrifts, the low-riding, fast-falling sun captured by plastic over hoops of steel – it’s all still here! :)
Little blizzard
In the last week, warm, sunny days, a field dry enough to start working, and the first round of seed is in the ground. Today’s sudden little blizzard, as full-on winter wonderland as it looked coming down, hardly got in the way—quick as it arrived, only six hours later, and all trace had vanished (helped along by a little rain). The weather: never anything less than exciting!
Transplanting…never twice the same!
Today’s transplants: Still steadily plugging in seedlings in the greenhouse, waiting for more ground to dry out. This round, lettuces (above) and bok choi (elsewhere). All this transplanting is pretty straightforward—taking the photo, I might wonder, “What’s the difference between these seedlings stuck in the ground, and any others…why bother posting the same thing over and over?” Well, I don’t literally ask myself that, but I can see how some folks may think that. There’s no good answer, it really is in the eye of the beholder.
On a tiny farm, where weather runs everything, you never know how little decisions will turn out, and how critically they may affect things. Decisions like, let’s put up this greenhouse in this wet-in-spring field that’s also slow to dry, and see what happens (because the alternatives are too expensive), and fix or work around any problems we may run into. In that greenhouse, THIS lettuce planting, in mucky ground, in all-new conditions that may also in a few days get infernally hot and downright lettuce-unfriendly if we don’t finish the end-wall windows for ventilation before the temperature shoots up, is entirely different from every other lettuce transplanting. New story, ending unknown, let’s see how it turns out! It’s always something different… :)