Would you believe we are praying for rain?

It is suddenly dry and warm, which is what we have been praying for, and that allowed us to work up some ground and transplant the first succession of greens out to the field. Last Friday after transplanting just two beds we became a little worried about our little babies because they wilted so bad they looked as though they keeled over and died. We haven’t seen them wilt so bad in previous years so we got a little nervous and decided to hold off on transplanting the remaining spring starts that were ready to go outdoors. The crops transplanted did perk up overnight so we continued transplanting a few more beds yesterday.

Some folks ‘harden off” their transplants by moving them to a staging area where they can still baby the plants a little but also do things like withhold water or expose the plants to lower/higher temperatures more like the outdoors than greenhouse temperatures that are maintained a specific temperatures. We haven’t adopted this strategy because our plants seem to always do fine and we just don’t have the time.

So our plants went from the ideal temperatures in the greenhouse to the suddenly 90 degrees outside and they just freaked out. Before last week our highs were in the fifties so not only are our plants a little stunned from this rapid change but we humans are as well.

On Friday after transplanting just two beds we set up irrigation thinking we might need to irrigate to save these babies. We have not had one week without precipitation in the form of snow or rain since last December and here we are setting up irrigation – doesn’t that seem amazing that we want to water – we just want to give our transplants a little bit of moisture to keep them happy.

We used to free range our chickens but since Harvey died (our livestock guardian) we lost about 80 layers to predators so have been keeping the 9 layers left in the coop. Here in the mountains we have a lot of predators so we have decided that we can’t sell eggs because it is just too expensive to raise chicks until they begin laying eggs only to have them eaten by coyotes, bobcats, opossums, raccoons or whatever else likes chicken. This week Noah found us a dog on craigslist who is only 3 months old. Noah named him Kaiser and Kaiser is a cross between a Great Pyrenees and Kangal. Kaiser is very cute with such soft fur just like a teddy bear you want to cuddle with. We hope he grows into a big tough guardian dog!

We have been keeping Kaiser locked in the barn with the goats so Sunday we let the goats and Kaiser out of the barn and were pleasantly surprised that Kaiser was hanging out with the goats in the pasture. (That is until the goats escaped their fence.) We are having issues containing our goats since they went “rouge” when late last summer Bailey the husky scared them away for a few months.