After enduring a pretty wintry two months, the fall rye can only be described as lush and green, the highlight of today’s brief walk around the field. It hasn’t grown much since late November, but it’s alive and kicking. Here, a light dusting of snow has melted as the sun pops in and out. The cover crop experiment continues…
Spent about four hours out in the field. The feeling of calm satisfaction as you head in after doing some work in the garden never fails! I dug up about half a bushel of carrots to see how they’ve done. These are, I think, Nelson and Danvers Half Long (the BIG ones)—the label stakes were out, so I couldn’t immediately check the varieties, it’s not necessarily that easy to tell! They’re mostly in fine shape. On a few, the inch or two exposed above-ground had frozen and thawed, leaving the top tips spongy and mushy, but this didn’t affect too many. I can probably get a couple of bushels! This mid-January harvest is actually consistent with last year, except for the extra 6-7 weeks of RealWinter… I also mulched the garlic, leaving a couple of beds clear as a test (I’m not sure how useful an experiment that is, since I’ll mulch them for moisture and against weeds first thing in spring…). Anyhow, a bit of winter fieldwork…
Happily expecting heat, I stepped out into a sharp, nasty wind this morning. The weather’s taken a downward turn from the cheery short-term forecast. It’s still going to be above zero for the next couple of days, They say, but just, and the nights have plummeted below. Also, in the 15-day, that follow-up warm spell predicted for 10 days from now has evaporated. All this meaning: harvest and mulch now! Unfortunately, the heavy wind makes grass mulching nearly futile (the mulch blows away), so I’ve put it all off till tomorrow…
A last hold-out of snow is melting off a section of spinach. While the color is a bit odd, with two distinct shades of green going on (cold effects!), the taste and texture are good. Spinach lives in these conditions, so as long as the leaves haven’t been battered by cold wind, they’re still good eating. Just sort!
After a night of rain and 50°F (10°C) warmth, the field is just about clear. What a difference a couple of days can make… I took a walk. The ground isn’t even frozen—with the odd way all that snow came before a real cooling down period, the ground was insulated by the snow and didn’t freeze too deeply. It’s quite strange. Usually, during the March end-of-winter melt-off, the clayey soil is wet, sticky, mucky, sucking, and the drainage is slower as the frozen ground thaws out, but now, some areas are dry enough to till! The scene also looks quite differen—greener!—than in previous years, because I’ve left a lot of cover crops (oats, bit of rye), and there were quite of few beds of late harvest veggies caught in the first snow. There’s potentially good stuff out there: huge carrots, beets, spinach. They may be too cold-damaged to be worth a harvest, I’ll check ’em out tomorrow. And the unmulched garlic is doing fine!
The big melt-off is well underway. The weather is not scary, it’s not like a violent storm, we’re wired to appreciate the warmth, but my body knows this is rather strange. A heavy, swirling mist has been everywhere since yesterday afternoon. The temperature remained steady in the 40’s (F, that’s 5°C+) right through the night. Ground is rapidly breaking through the snow cover, which was 1′-2′ (30-60cm) across the garden field. The fog effect is always nice: just about everything looks mysterious and cool, like the nearly dead black locust tree in the farmhouse front yard (actually, that tree always looks good)…
The snow is seriously…receding.
Today, another weird weather reminder, and something I haven’t really noticed or thought about in years: slush. Road slush, in particular. Today’s sudden warmth—it’s near 50°F (10°C)—melted water into the abundant snow (snowbanks help), and there you have it: heavy, wet, cold, and sludgy slush! Ready to splatter! On the roads, it’s an unappetizing brownish-gray as the road dirt is churned in by traffic—this is a nice example at the top of the village hill. If you’ve lived in a snowy northern city, where drainage is only as good as the sewage system and cars are everywhere, you’ll know slush build-up as quite the little menace. Getting properly splattered by speeding vehicles is so much more…thorough than the average puddle splashing. Especially when you get it in the face… Here in farm country, cars and trucks are way more respectful of the people walking down the road (as I do every day)—at least, they are on the side roads—and with the shrinking winters (this one so far excepted) and full ditch drainage, you just don’t notice slush too often. We haven’t had slushable amounts of snow in a while. The next few days ought to be interesting. As predicted (this time, they were right), the days AND nights are WARM until, it seems, Friday. Two winters in one?
The choice storage spot for tiny farm gear, especially during winter, is this giant shelf, where it’s warm and dry. It’s at the back of the Extended Milkhouse, the last 3-1/2′ of the old ceiling, propped up on the leading edge by a beam across and 4″x4″ posts. It would maybe qualify as an upper level, if you could actually stand up: clearance is only 3-4′ under the new sloped ceiling. It’s 3-1/2’x20′ (1mx6m) of up out of the way space…a big shelf! About 7-1/2′ feet high, I get up there by ladder. Only one season old, it’s still startlingly clear, orderly, and almost entirely filled with immediately useful stuff as opposed to sure-to-be-useful-sometime gear (though the inevitable packing boxes saved just in case of return already have a presence). It’s dusty up there. At this end are the many fluorescent light fixtures (12, I think) for the grow racks. They hang from chains from those dowels in front, and the dowels in turn hang by the nails from more chains on the rack! When seedlings are all done, I remove the lights and use the racks for harvest storage. The oscillating table fan is used to give newly emerged seedlings a bit of a toughening up, conditioning breeze. Down at the other end, stacks of 3″ peat pots and plug sheets and trays. Time to start seedling room set-up!