It is truly a leap of faith, when I start the greenhouse with early seedlings when the nights are still going down to -25 degrees Celsius and the greenhouse roof is covered with a thick layer of snow and ice. After a few days of heating, the snow is gradually receding off the roof and the rock heat sink is slowly heating up again. I have a fan to blow the hot air down into the rocks in the daytime. Ken and Jim built a new incubation chamber for starting the seedlings. Mixing up the potting soil, filling the seedling trays and carefully counting out the number of seeds into each cell has taken most of my time this week. Now I am eagerly awaiting the emergence of the first signs of life!
The “free range” chickens have been peeking out, enjoying the warm sunshine, but they usually don’t venture too far from the chicken coop in the snow. One made it out to the cedar hedge, behind our house, and called to me in the evening when I went out to shut the chicken door on the coop. She hadn’t found her way back. I had to wade through heavy snow sinking up to my thighs to retrieve her and carry her back to the coop to be tucked in for the night. After their winter holiday from laying we are now getting a few eggs every day from our hens.
Our Suffolk Punch horses are happy in the snow with their warm winter coats. Snow is always better than mud for the horses in the winter. Hopefully, once it warms up the snow will all melt in a hurry and it and dry up without too much mud! The warmth in the radiant spring sunshine is always enjoyed by the horses too. Ken has started cutting some lumber and firewood. He has hauled the logs out of the woods with the draft horses, but the snow is so deep this year that it is difficult for the horses to get through the trails in the woods.
Ken has also been busy building another horse drawn no-till planter for field crops. It will be a special small model so the draft horses can pull it. He has salvaged some parts from a tractor no-till implement and is having fun putting it all together. This spring he will give it a test and see if the parts all work as planned. He has until June to get it into working order.
We are looking forward to the arrival of our first interns the end of the month. CSA applications are coming in every day in anticipation of another growing season. We still have lots of spots to fill before our first pick-up in the second half of May. The first head lettuce seeds for transplants into the hoop houses to provide head lettuce for the first CSA pick-up are already planted and so it begins…
