The wild bunch

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Mainly mucking about today. Visited with the goats. Around 15 of ’em. These girls upfront are the current kingpins of the goat yard. Goats have their pecking order (just like the chickens to come!), which mainly means a few get first crack at food, or crowding at the fence, or whatever else they all want to do, while the rest back away and wait or get butted. It’s mostly rank by size, but a vicious streak counts, too. The one in the middle is on top now (with her friend on the right), the brown pair on the left (the Evil Twins), used to be a vicious tag team running the yard, but they lost their edge. Not that they’re always fighting, a brief burst of deterrent action goes a long way. It’s like a soap opera if you watch ’em every day. Goats…

Every year, this little period in the first half of March is kinda like waiting for the starting gun. I’m full of energy and waiting on the weather. A little EDGY. All the early starts are now under lights: onions (first time from seed), celery (another first), more leek and parsley, plus the stuff started around the end of January (leek, parsley, rosemary, arugula, lettuce). It’s another week to the peppers and eggplant, and then the grow racks will start to get full, and I’m also holding off till then to transplant the early lettuce to the greenhouse. As soon as the snow clears and the temperature warms up a bit, there’s outdoor fix-it work, starting with an old ice fishing hut to turn into a home for the composting toilet (an outhouse for the field!) and the chickenhouse to renovate. There’s a list. Plus a lot of garden clean-up, crops left over winter, that should be pulled as soon as I can. MEANWHILE, I’m waiting…

Chicken catalogs

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There’s a catalog for everything. Bob dropped off two with chickens (turkeys, ducks, pheasants, partridge and quail, too). I’m looking at dual purpose birds… It’s pretty sure that chickens will return in small numbers to the farm this year, but not a done deal till April. For me, it’s a completely new tiny farming…adventure. I’m going into it much more casually than usual with new farm stuff, because for this year it’s mostly for fun. I don’t really have a PLAN. We have room for about 50 birds in the current chickenhouse set-up, so it’s not such a big thing. We’ll see next month!

More fun with lettuce

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Some of the early lettuce I ended up leaving two to a cell, to see how they’d do. Now, I divided a bunch of those and potted them up singly to a much roomier 38-cell plug sheet (up from 72), and trimmed off all their leaves (and ate them). After the shock of transplanting straight from indoors to the greenhouse, the lettuce seedlings usually lose their bigger leaves anyway, so why not give them a head start?! It’s extremely time-consuming, all of this careful repotting and trimming—not practical for the market garden at all. But I know I’ll be closely watching the results of this early, cold-hoophouse planting, so I’ll see if they do better than the regular plugs. Later on in the season, I intend to keep experimenting in more practical ways, but time and many other things to do have their way with the best laid plans… (Hint: As a rule, it’s best to start seedlings in the biggest and DEEPEST container that you have room for in good light, and avoid potting up. The less you disturb roots, and the more room you give them to grow (especially, down), the better they seem to do when transplanted.)

Two arugulas

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The arugula, about a month from seeding, is looking lush and…TASTY. While fiddling with macro focus and tripod (I’ve been using a borrowed one lately for indoor pics), I reached around to pluck a leaf. And another… I’ve been wandering back all morning for quick tastes. You either like arugula, or you don’t (can you be MADE to?)… It’s an easy, not subtle, veggie rush: first the familiar arugula flavor with that hint of mustard, slowly building as you begin to chew, and suddenly—wait for it—BAM, a little peppery explosion. I’m fairly new to this treat, it’s only since tiny farming that I paid attention, though I knew the taste, and only last season that I grew it out of salad mix, as a separate crop. It’s still a bit of a novelty. Here, the two varieties, somewhat generically named Rocket (smoother-edged), and Skyrocket, have quite different leaf shapes, but so far, I don’t think I could tell the tastes apart. These are two to a cell, and heading out to the greenhouse in the next week or so… (I should note, arugula grows fast, you can usually start harvesting 30-35 days from seeding, so planting this early indoors wasn’t exactly necessary, just a pre-season experiment.)

Still snowy

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What would you expect at this time of year around here? This, I guess. Although we haven’t had any real storms lately, the snow keeps coming down here and there. The 15-day forecast has a short warmer stretch next week, and then below-freezing days through to mid-March. We’ll see…

Fuzzy little rosemary

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Hmmm, so that’s what tiny rosemary seedlings REALLY look like with their first true leaves. I’m experimenting with the new camera. On macro, it’s practically a microscope. I can focus as close as 1 cm (less than half an inch) away. That’s a little tough to manage, but with 12 megapixels of resolution, I can focus from a more reasonable 6 inches away and then ZOOM IN in the image editing program. Rosemary gets a whole new look compared to the old camera. What a cool tiny farming tool, if you need pictures…

Parsley update

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Around two weeks after showing up, the first set of curly parsley is putting out its first true leaves. This is Krausa Market, a “triple curled” leaf variety. Aka moss-curled. There’s also double-curled leaves, like the Forest Green and Green Pearl, also in the trays. Single-curled? Don’t think so… I still have a little time to leisurely examine seedlings and wonder about such things. I started thinking about the farmers’ market and all the SPEAKING that involves (on a busy Saturday, it can be practically 6 hours of non-stop veggie talk), and the gazillion kinda BASIC details there are to know about every single crop. What are the main types of leaf lettuce? Are muskmelons the same as cantaloupes? What’s the difference between slicing and pickling cukes, or American, European and Middle Eastern cukes? How do you pronounce Chioggia beets? Stupice tomatoes? How do you cook ____? The possibilities are endless! Of course, I don’t need to know any of these things. I don’t even have to know the names of the varieties. Veggies grow regardless. When questions come up, I could shrug and say, “Dunno” or “Good question!” Still, I’d rather have some answers, pass on whatever I’ve picked up along the way. Right now, I’m still wondering about triple- and double-curled parsley, but that’ll pass… :)

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