Tag: snow - Page 10 - Tiny Farm Blog

Trimming leeks

7 May 20135 Mar 2008 by Mike (tfb)

Trimming back leeks is really satisfying. Here, I’m doing the first planting. With most indoor veggie seedlings and my two-lamp fluorescent fixtures, it’s lots of tray rotating and light height adjusting to keep the stretching to a minimum.

Leek can reach all they want: at three inches (7.5cm) or so, I snip them back to about an inch (2.5cm). What could be simpler?! This goes for the onions coming up as well.

With nice low seedlings, the light can be better concentrated across the trays, and cutting back may ensure stockier growth, which is generally a good thing when it comes to seedlings (update: I read a pretty definitive-sounding study that disproved the growing-stockier part; either way, it’s worth trimming just for keeping them closer to the light).

This is the first year of starting both leek and onion indoors from seed (in the past, it’s been direct-seeded leek, and onion sets)—I’ve not actually DONE this before—so there’s the usual slight bit of reservation with trying something new. Seeing is believing. Fun (easy) so far!

Elsewhere, we got what looked like a foot of snow overnight. No problem, no extra work, except the lane, barnyard and path to the greenhouse had to be plowed again…

Still snowy

1 Mar 200829 Feb 2008 by Mike (tfb)

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…

Still snow…

10 Oct 201113 Feb 2008 by Mike (tfb)

The snow hasn’t gone anywhere in the last week, and there’s not much to see or do out there. The greenhouse needs to be cleaned up and made ready for an early March opening. That’ll be a day’s work next week, I still have to purchase a heater (indoor kerosene, I think it’ll be). And that’s it for now for gardening outdoors…

More weather

24 Mar 20087 Feb 2008 by Mike (tfb)

This February, tiny farming for me is mostly about, inside, watching seedlings in a growing number of plug sheets under lights, and outside, watching the weather. In this zone, Feb is a little early for thinking about garden conditions. Well, “normally”, it would be. Now, given the increasingly erratic winter, I’m trying to figure out a new early season production strategy. Conceivably, end of March could be shockingly warm and the ground dry enough to work, and instead of just seeding early peas, I could try some super early field transplants. But then, what if winter happened to come back, not for a day or two of April snow, as sometimes happens, but for a week or two, with freezing temperatures. Early plantings could get killed off, and then I’d need a second set of seedlings! This is how I’m kinda starting to think, about trying to plant around the weather, take advantage of unpredictably good conditions, while expecting some weird bad turns as well. What do last and first average frost dates really mean, given the last five years? Is a 30-year local rainfall average still in any way a useful guideline? Am I…exaggerating? Two days ago, it was 40°F (5°C) and raining right through the night. I was sure the forecast for an even warmer Wednesday would come through to finish off another, fourth big melt-off. Instead, yesterday morning it did a sudden 180, froze up and dumped a ton of snow. Today, there are 7-8′ snowbanks all around the barnyard (from snow plowing). The once and future chickenhouse practically disappeared… ;) Will spring and summer be different from that?!

Riding the weather

4 Feb 20082 Feb 2008 by Mike (tfb)

If this first half of winter is any indication at all, the upcoming growing season could be a really crazy ride. After the extensive one-day melt-off, just four days ago, followed by an immediate plunge into bitter cold, the snow came back just as quickly with a one-day storm yesterday and through part of last night. I deliberately don’t watch much news anymore, but I did catch the weather report of this massive, North America-wide blizzard and/or ice storm, depending on where in its path you happened to be. (At the same time, I saw reports of weird heavy snow stranding millions in China, and freakish winter tornadoes somewhere else.) Well, here we didn’t get that heavy a blast, maybe six or eight inches, but enough to instantly restore classic winter conditions. The photo below is snow plowed aside in the barnyard this morning, the rail fence peeking out from behind is 5′ (1.5m) high. Now, it looks like 50°F (10°C) and rain for at least a day or two mid-week. If that happens, IT’LL ALL BE GONE AGAIN! This is the THIRD major full-snow-no-snow cycle so far this winter, and it looks like more to come. I know this extreme weather is a global thing, we’re ALL feeling something wild, but I figure, keeping a daily-or-so journal of what’s going on on THIS tiny farm, I ought to get it down anyway. For the record! :)

Extreme farming…

28 Nov 200830 Jan 2008 by Mike (tfb)

Yesterday, the temperature decided to climb up to just over 40°F (5°C) and stay there for the day…and well into the night. Around midnight, it began to rain. By the time I peeked out this morning, it was back to bitter cold and frozen ground, but not before most of the snow had melted away. This seems really unusual, even for the weather extremes we’ve been having the last five years. It’s the second meltoff so far where the ground actually thawed out. Bob, who has an old school farmer’s memory of conditions going back a good 40 farming years, says THIS is the single weirdest winter he can recall…and it’s only half through. I’m not shocked. As I often (kinda… cheerfully) say to people, having started into this growing life exactly five seasons ago, crazy weather is all I’ve known! Before that, notable weather events were absolutely discrete, novelty items in my mind, there was no practical reason to connect one to the other and maintain any sort of continuous memory of conditions over the years…like farmers and gardeners do. Now that I do have a short bit of weather memory to work with, what it tells me is that, in the field, you really can’t count on ANYTHING at all, from one month to the next, and even less so from year to year. “Gone completely haywire” comes to mind. Garden accordingly… It really is tiny farming as an extreme sport!

Quite white

31 Jan 200827 Jan 2008 by Mike (tfb)

Hard to believe that three weeks ago, after nearly two months of looking like this, it all melted off and stayed clear for a whole week. Well, winter seems to be back for good, although there’s a little bit of warming in the forecast. Snow in a field is interesting for a minute, but…nothing changes. Right about now, it’d be great to have an unheated production-sized greenhouse (at least 24’x60′) , filled with carrots, spinach, leek, some parsley and kale,… One day soon. Until then, it’s this!