Spring

Rack built

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New lumber turns into new grow rack. This adds a fourth to the set, a measure of tiny farm growth. I started with two in Year 1, built another one last year (Year 5). It’s not like the focus here is on rapid expansion…this is the speed of staying tiny! ;)

Although I don’t build these often, it seems to get quicker every time. Well under a hundred dollars of wood, wheels, screws, bolts, brackets, hooks and chains, plus a chop saw, a drill and a couple of hours, and there it is! Light fixtures are extra. In the pic, the shelves still have to go on.

Lying across the middle supports is one of the four old fluorescent fixtures, given to me instead of being tossed in the trash. Not only free, they’re BETTER: these are the overhead lighting type you see in (horribly lit) offices, the tubes are spaced farther apart than in the standard shop lights I’ve been using, the light will spread more evenly over a larger area—for the seedlings, a lot less leaning and stretching…

Peppers!

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Another little new-season milestone: the first of the original veggie gang has appeared. These are Gypsy (hybrid) sweet peppers, seeded six days ago, along with other varieties of pepper and eggplant. They started to poke up in the last day or so, and by this morning, the first leaves had unfolded. Along with tomatoes (soon to be seeded), I think of these three—toms, eggplant, peppers—as my original crops. These are the veggies I started first (and way early) in Year 1: winter was storming along outside, while these brilliant little splashes of green were popping up in the warm, bright bubble of the first seedling room (a side room in the farmhouse). I was fascinated and kind of amazed. I used to come downstairs in the middle of the night to check ’em out, make sure they were still alive and growing… Actually, it’s not so different even now! :)

Meet my garden spirit guide

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So I’m heading into the house this morning, by the winter front door, which is a door cut into the attached-garage door (it’s easier to keep clear of snow than the real front door…). Kinda zoned out and lost in thought, I was on my final step, arm out, automatically reaching for the door handle, when suddenly, whoaaa!, I froze and stepped back. By mere inches, I’d almost grabbed a handful of OWL. There’ve been owls in the barn, and an owl can be seen once in a while sitting on a pole in the farmhouse backyard, but we definitely don’t have owls calmly hanging out on the front door handle. This had to mean something. This had to be a Sign! The owl was just perched there, perfectly laid back, kinda squinty, looking at me. It didn’t flinch. I took another few steps back to check things out. It watched me, unperturbed. Hmmm… I checked it out for a couple of minutes, kinda walking around, moved closer again, slowly reached towards it. No problem, it just watched me back. Then I headed to the Milkhouse for my camera, returned, and still the owl. It let me come as close as I liked. It really didn’t seem to mind me being well within touching distance, a couple of feet away. A few minutes later, Bob went by and I called him over. The owl was unfazed by TWO people looming around (since it was my owl encounter, maybe at that moment, Bob didn’t really exist?). After a couple more minutes, looking perfectly airworthy, it calmly flew away through the four feet of space between us… And it was gone. So what was up with the owl? Could be that, with youthful naivety (it looked…young), and the natural confidence of a predator high on the food chain, and maybe being tired out by too much flying, and having to squint in the bright sun, it just didn’t care. That’s possible. More likely, though, it was simply there to hook me up with forces unseen and the entire spirit world. It gazed at me for a long time and I felt good. At last, my spirit guide revealed! Of course, I had to vet all of this and get more words and meaning, so I rushed inside and hit the Web. Wooo… Glancing at the first search results got me worried, all messenger of death stuff. But, the fantastic thing about the Web is, keep looking and you can find whatever you want! Like this page, much more…REASONABLE, that explained how cool having a personal owl encounter is, with words like “wisdom”, “protector” and “symbolic of inner knowing”. I particularly liked: “If an owl has visited you, an incredible gift has been bestowed.” This is good! Thanks!! Life on this tiny farm now walks with the owls… (It’s a fully-grown adult northern saw-whet owl; thanks to Sharon the BirdChick for ID-ing it in the comments below!)

Spring begins

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“Spring begins” is what it says on my calendar. In the field, there’s a foot or two of snow everywhere that’s flat, with piled high snow banks and deep drifts wherever possible. The sun is getting higher and hotter by the day, but the air’s stayed cold to freezing. Today looked a lot different than this time last year, but not so far off from late March 2006. Nothing a couple of warm days and some rain won’t fix. Predictions are for a drawn out wind down to winter around here, but I’m expecting anything and imagining a warm and sunny early spring…starting any day now. As usual, we shall see!

Checking potatoes

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Potatoes are looking good, all weeded and hilled, around seven weeks after going in. There’s been a Colorado potato beetle watch on for the last few days, the little guys are out in some force this year, more than in the last couple, although not a major problem so far. Control is time-consuming (what isn’t ! :) but easy: they tend to congregate conveniently on the topmost leaves, munching away, so we pick them or shake ’em off into a small bucket of water. A simple end.

Cloud show

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Second only perhaps to badly done snapshots of kittens are unfortunate attempts at capturing majestic cloud formations. Still, this evening, I couldn’t help but point the camera at the sky and snap away… For an hour or more as the sun set, all manner of clouds formed and reformed into the most fantastic combinations and configurations I’ve seen in a while. At one point, the wind suddenly picked up from a breeze to maybe 40km and low, menacing storm clouds, seemingly close enough to jump up and touch, raced across to one side but missed us entirely, then the wind as suddenly died down. Everywhere you looked, fancy cloud action was going on. I spend a fair amount time looking at the sky, usually to see if rain is actually going to make it all the way to us instead of veering away at the last minute. But a lot of the time, as you look around, the sky joins the field, your gaze travels up, and it’s all…good! (Hope the photo manages to stir fun memories of…looking up!)

Three generations…

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On the left, watering in the latest of six succession plantings of mesclun with a basic lawn sprinkler that’s quite efficient for shallow irrigation of newly seeded beds, when there’s no wind. Here you see the last three generations. I started planting four beds at a time, a week apart, and stretched that to nearly two weeks as the sun, heat and regular rain we’ve had so far made the growing fast. With the great weather, they’re catching up to each other—you can see the beds on the bottom right are moving up on the previous planting up top—and I’ll be tilling under a lot. This is absolutely strange for me, in past years, cutting every last bit of available salad greens every week was normal. But the people and planting expansion this year make this sort of abundance the new normal, production levels that assure harvests for all the CSA members, market and stand, even if conditions get tough. It’s not WASTED, I tell myself, it’s organic matter and even nutrients, back to the soil… I’m getting used to it!


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