{"id":676,"date":"2011-03-09T16:30:58","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T20:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.orchardhillfarm.ca\/?p=676"},"modified":"2011-03-21T10:56:50","modified_gmt":"2011-03-21T14:56:50","slug":"snow-drops-a-harbinger-of-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.orchardhillfarm.ca\/?p=676","title":{"rendered":"Snow Drops a Harbinger of Spring"},"content":{"rendered":"

I never tire of seeing the first Snow Drops of the season. What a harbinger of spring they are. Despite all the snow that lingers around and the cold weather they burst forth with all there faith that spring is here! Ken heard the first Whistling Swans this morning too. \u00a0I have been receiving a steady influx of applications for our 2011 CSA garden. We are looking forward to our apprentices arriving the end of the month. \u00a0It has been quite a chore this year sorting through work permits for our non-Canadian apprentices, and we hope that everything is in place in time for the start of our apprentice program.<\/p>\n

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Snow Drops at Orchard Hill Farm<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n
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Seedling Trays \/ First of the Season<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Our make shift greenhouse doesn’t have heat yet so I started our first seedling trays yesterday in the house. They will be fine until they germinate and then they will need the sun. When our CSA members eat their first head lettuce and pac choi they can think of how this was the beginning. I enjoyed getting my hands into the potting soil and planting again. A sure sign that I must be in the right profession. Ken is busy doing tractor repairs in his heated workshop. \u00a0A good job on a cold raining March day.<\/p>\n

When we first started farming we made up a logo with a stump and sucker. (You can still see it on some of our farm road signs.) Ken had spent a lot of time in orchards and was familiar with the site of young suckers growing out of tree stumps. We were \u00a0a young farm with new energy starting up out of \u00a0my old family farm. \u00a0The original farm house, built in 1837, is at the other end of the original farm. My Quaker ancestors cleared this land, but my parents had rented it out for almost 30 years before we started farming again in 1979. There was an old maple tree at the top of the hill that had survived since before the farm land was cleared and in the late 1990’s the old maple fell down in a March ice storm. It gives me great pleasure to see the young sapling growing up beside the old maple stump as a reminder of the life that continues to grow strong on this little farm with deep roots.

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Martha and Siblings after the Old Maple Fell<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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Old Maple in 1996 with Ken and Daughter, Ellen<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n
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Stump and Sapling<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I never tire of seeing the first Snow Drops of the season. What a harbinger of spring they are. Despite all the snow that lingers around and the cold weather they burst forth with all there faith that spring is here! Ken heard the first Whistling Swans this morning too. \u00a0I have been receiving a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[62,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.orchardhillfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.orchardhillfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.orchardhillfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.orchardhillfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.orchardhillfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.orchardhillfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":694,"href":"http:\/\/www.orchardhillfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions\/694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.orchardhillfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.orchardhillfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.orchardhillfarm.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}