Della watering onions in the greenhouse
Della watering onions in the greenhouse

Spring has sprung us into action – the past 10 days or so have been a flurry of activity as the temperatures warmed, and the sun was out to keep us company. It was frustrating to watch the days tick by as our planned ‘plant by’ dates for planting seeds outside staled on the calendar. Martha has a very seasoned approach to the sporadic weather – when it was warm so early this year, and us young’uns were preparing ourselves for an early spring, she predicted colder weather in the future ‘because things always seem to even out’. And here we are, more or less on the same old schedule. Experience (and Mother Nature) prevails.

Hoophouse
Hoophouse Assembly

This year’s garden has been plotted out, plowed, disked and cultivated. All of the early cool-weather crops have been planted and covered with row cover – salad greens, spinach, radishes, peas, green onions. The black bags you see in the background of some of these photos are bags of soil that we fill each year to hold down the edges of the row cover to ensure that the rows stay covered. One windy year we ended up with row cover in the wind and there are still remnants in a black walnut tree – five years later!

We have also been moving, assembling and planting hoop houses. They are a big help in getting things in the ground early – they are currently planted with lettuces and pok choi, and soon the tomatoes will be going in. We interplant lettuce with the tomatoes – by the time the tomatoes are big enough to shade out the lettuce, it will be time to harvest it. Yesterday the wind almost did away with $800 worth of hoophouse plastic as we were putting it on hoophouse ‘Papa’ (aka the big one).

Lots of wood for next winter! Bryan and Heidi hard at work...
Lots of wood for next winter! Bryan and Heidi hard at work…

The wildflowers are starting to bloom in the woods – just the very earliest ones now – hopefully they will be in full bloom for the Spring Fair wagon rides through the woods next Saturday, April 30!

Stay tuned for the introduction to the interns, coming soon!