Our farming season officially kicked off on March 3rd and we’ve had mild enough weather to work outdoors for about half of the month.
This feels like a monumental gift compared to last year when 3’ of snow in the middle of March stopped everything.
At times it seems like there’s just a lot of empty beds awaiting veggies. But I can see the foundational work that’s happened this month and it’ll make all the difference in the months to come.
Repairs to hoophouses and equipment, deep cleaning, amending beds for future plantings and pre-sprouting weeds to help with weed pressure in our intensely planted beds.
The initial weeding of the garlic, trays and trays of nursery seedlings and finally winning a battle against rodents eating our peas…we think.
It’s all wrapped up into our first month back in the field.
I’m incredibly grateful for the gift of a mild, if windy, spring and feeling great about where we are.
We started out with a pretty blank canvas but gradually we began to seed crops in hoophouses. First lettuce & carrots, then peas, spinach, turnips and spring onions.
While waiting on seeds to germinate we prepared field beds, inspect hoses, repaired the water pump & germination chamber and changed out the end walls of the nursery hoophouse.
We seeded lots of nursery starts, washed and sanitized cell flats, weeded the garlic & learned how to use new equipment. Mark then fiddled with the new equipment and invented a mechanism to make it safer (more on that to come).
Elliot Coleman designed this device, called a tilther, to stir amendments shallowly into the top surface of the soil doing less damage that a traditional tiller and creating a nice seedbed for our seeder.
All in all, we’re ahead of schedule, crops are growing and progress is being made. Ladybirds, worms and spiders join us each day and the only damper on the month so far is 30’ of peas eaten by mice, voles and rats before we finally got to our current stretch of 3 damage free days…here’s hoping the worst of that is over!
