Finally able to work up a little ground!

We are so thankful that our soils dried enough this week allowing us to work up some ground for direct seeding. Direct seeding is when we place the seeds right into the soil out in the fields. We do much more seed starting than direct seeding.  We use the term seed starting (growing transplants) for when we place seeds into flat inserts then once the plant is a good size it is transplanted outdoors to fend for itself.

Seed Starting/Transplanting is much more reliable than direct seeding because when starting little seeds in the greenhouse you can provide them with the perfect germinating environment: controlled temperatures, controlled seed depth and water. I find it a miracle that one can drop a seed in the soil outdoors, and then it gets rained on, snowed on, stampeded by the neighbor’s dogs (our dog to, but we can’t blame little Harmon for anything!), but still sprouts and becomes something edible.

Our goal is to have food crops for the first tailgate market of the season, which is April 17th, but Mother Nature just doesn’t see it that way this year. To have crops for our first couple markets we need to have things direct seeded by mid March; however, we had snow then rain and just this week is the first time our fields have dried enough to plant.

That brings me to the deer problem. We have soils that would dry out faster than the soils in our fenced area but we can’t plant crops tempting to the deer such as beets, spinach and lettuce mix. Only a few limited crops may be planted in our fields that aren’t fenced and those being: potatoes, onions and garlic. If we had the money we would have fenced our entire farm!

This past week we were able to seed radishes, arugula and lettuce mix outside and we transplanted cucumbers and zucchini into a greenhouse. We also partially assembled a greenhouse frame – we raised the bows and bolted up the top purlin – so it is looking more like a greenhouse every day.We are out of space in our propagation area and need to free up space so our plan is to move onions out of our propagation greenhouse and into a greenhouse heated by the wood boiler. The onions won’t be so warm at night but they should still continue to grow! They have another couple weeks before they are ready for transplanting out to the field.

Sabrina is an awesome photographer so here are her photos! I hope to post more because she has captured some amazing farm moments on disk. (In the days gone by I would have used “Film” rather than disk. Is that the right term?)