Biting into the barcode on an apple, dreaming of the first garden meal… This is one of the many little quiet-before-it-all-goes-crazy times that happen through the season, a few things already going, just waiting for the moment that seems right to start seeding the rest. I’ve been steadily reducing the time indoors for seedlings, and this year, with the greenhouse not yet moved and set up, and the disking of the newly plowed land being hired out—you can’t count in a scheduled date until the machine is in the field!—I have to keep in mind that there may be a bit of an extra delay, beyond the weather. So, I’ve been carefully waiting… With transplant seedlings, give or take a week or two or even three can make a lot of difference, or very little at all—weather, weather, weather!—and there’s nothing concrete to go on, just…instinct(?!)…a FEELING about when it’s right to start… :)
One-horse farming
Conall‘s winter job this year is cutting firewood on Canada’s east coast (Nova Scotia), in partnership with his trusty workhorse, Dixie. It sounds pretty intense. He started tiny farming from scratch two seasons ago, our first full-season full-timer, way back in ’07. Last year, he was out in NS, on a tiny, one-horse farm, learning to plow and cultivate veggies, and bring in the hay, with Dixie. This winter’s job involves heading into the woods with Dixie, where he fells small trees with a chainsaw, guides Dixie to drag the logs, at times through waist-deep snow, to a clearing, cuts down the logs to firewood, loads it onto the sled, and hauls it out for delivery. Conall’s plan for this summer: a Dixie-powered market garden… What I wonder is, the Kubota compact tractor vs Dixie?
The great WARM outdoors!
Ahhh, yes, THIS is what warm weather feels like! For the first time this year, the temperature topped 60°F (15°C), with a hazy sun and a gentle breeze. We’ve had some melt-off days already, but this one tastes like spring! Usually, there’s a day like this sometime in February, so it’s been a long time coming, and makes me wonder how even crazier the rest of the weather will be. No worries…today feels great.
The photo is a good to-do list for when real spring comes and the ground is dry enough to work and get around on. There’s a jumble of spare lumber taken from the barn when we cleared an area for the new seedling room—it needs to be sorted and stacked, and some of it will be the new chickenhouse! (Only patches of snow are left on much of the land, but I’m sure it’ll be back before it’s really gone.) The abundantly overgrown grasses that partially surround the barn and border the moldboarded garden areas is a big clean-up job. And, up the slope, the Kubota compact tractor calmly waits for after the hired-big-tractor disking and the compost spreading, when we do the final tilling of the garden beds. Coming soon. Cool!
Lead bean, Part 2
I ended up putting the sprouted fava beans in a pan of water, instead of discarding them after the mini-germination test, and put the pan on a south-facing windowsill. A few days ago, a little natural selection happened: the pan got knocked to the floor, and the kinda brittle main root snapped on three of them, leaving only the biggest, healthiest one in one piece. I put it back in the pan… Amazing what a plant can do, in a few days, with nothing but water and some sun. Tiny hydroponics!
Last-frost countdown begins!
Today I marked the official farming wall calendar with the weekly weeks-to-transplant countdown: 11, 10, 9,… I do this every year, and usually a lot earlier than this! Because so much is kinda, well, UNKNOWN this growing season as far as overall production conditions on the new farm, my reaction is not to overplan and not try to anticipate every last possible potential problem. I suppose the approach varies by the person! Anyhow, having those numbers finally up there on the wall somehow really gets the adrenaline going…
What that “11” represents is 11 weeks to average last frost date, which around here is May 18 (I actually backed it up by one day, to start on a Sunday, just felt like it). This is a pretty arbitrary number, weather conditions have consistently varied SO MUCH in the last few years, last frost is ony a loose guideline. It’s something to base the gambling on.
So, it’s now 11 weeks until the odds are even that there’ll be no more frost, the soil has warmed up sufficiently, and it’s reasonably safe to transplant. From this, I can figure the timing of seed starts.
It goes like this… For tomatoes, I aim for about 6 weeks from sowing the seed in plug sheets to transplanting, so I still have FIVE WEEKS before starting toms. But, I usually want to have at least 100 tomato seedlings ready to go 2 weeks earlier than that, in case the weather’s really good, and for that I have to start in 3 weeks. Peppers I aim for 8 weeks, so that’s start in…3 weeks.
Broccoli, cauliflower and other brassicas are only around 6 weeks, BUT, they’re quite cold-hardy and can be transplanted out 3-4 weeks BEFORE last frost, sometime in the last half of April, so that means the first wave starts in a week or two! Onions and leek can also go out early, and are indoors for around 10 weeks. Some onions are already started, and the rest have to be started right about NOW.
And so on, for around 20 veggies that start as transplants…
The scratchy “11” on the calendar was originally a “7”—at first, I accidentally started numbering backwards from April instead of May. For a moment there, that was a shock! :)
Plug sheets, get ready!
It’s getting near that time when a whole lotta seed gets started—company is on the way for the onions and parsley! I’m still sorting and setting up around here, doing a bit of this and a bit of that every day (an INCREMENTAL approach to the many different things to do on the tiny farm that would drive some people…nuts, but works for me right now! :). On the getting-ready-for-seed-starting front, today I unpacked all of the plug sheets and trays from inside the composting toilet home where they made the farm move. It’s a stack about 5-1/2′ (1.7m) high, still dusty from months of storage on the Big Shelf. It’s a bit of a head rush to imagine all of them being filled, tended, and then moved out to the field in the next three months. Crazy.
South slope waiting
The promising south-facing slope is there, plowed and waiting! After the last melt-off, we quickly went back to freezing temperatures day and night, and more wall-to-wall snow cover. A couple of days ago, a bit of chilly rain cleared things up quite a bit once again. Today, it’s frigid!