Our first spring direct seeding

We have already seeded little seedings in the greenhouse but it is finally warm enough to direct seed our first succession of spinach, peas and arugula.  To us, “Direct Seeding” is puting the seed directly into the soil in the field, while “Seed Starting” is seeding into flats in the greenhouse. The weather was warm and the soil dry, so a few days after seeding we decided we needed to irrigate the soil to aid the seeds in sprouting.  We set up our aluminum rainbird irrigation sprinklers and were thinking that we would soon be irrigating.  We then started the pump, but because the field where we seeded is a good bit up hill from our water source, and our irrigation pump being only a 5.5 HP pump, could not push enough water uphill to run our rainbird sprinklers.  We bought a used 10 HP a few years back that, like much of our equipment on the farm isn’t running, so Carl spent an afternoon getting it running but he was unable to get it tuned well enough to pump water up to the field .  So the next day we dragged out our PVC mini wobblers and set them up and were able to water the seeds in with our 5.5 HP pump!   We have never grown greens up in this field so it is a new adventure this season.