Spring Crunch

It’s that time of year when everything suddenly needs to happen at once. The arrival of the spring peepers heralds the official end of winter and maple syrup season, and the race is on before summer hits. Last year, we seemed to skip springtime entirely, with May changing from snowstorms to 90 degrees within the span of a week. That didn’t make it very amenable to putting in the garden in April as I’d so carefully planned.
Spring is also that time of year when all the projects pile up. Yes, there have been projects all winter–mostly of the indoor variety. But now that it’s warm enough to work outside, the list of things to do has quadrupled overnight. We’ve mounted a whiteboard by the walk-in cooler at Farmstead just to help us keep track of all the elements that are on deck for 2019. Here is a peek into a few of them.

New Turkey Coop
Our flock of 22 heritage turkey hens and toms that serve as our breeding stock currently live in the old chicken coop that Bert Fullington (son of Lloyd, who sold the homestead to my grandparents back in 1968) had helped us move into the barnyard in 1998. It had been living in the woods as a generator house for a hunting shack for who knows how long before that. And before it was a generator shack, it was a three-door shower house at a resort. For years, there was a sign above one of the doors that still read “shower” in stenciled paint. So the age of this shower turned shack turned chicken coop is anyone’s guess. We’d added more windows, replaced the main door, put on a new roof, slapped on several new coats of paint over the years, and generally kept the structure going. But this spring’s flooding was really the last straw for the old coop, and it’s looking like it’s about time to take it down.
But the turkeys still need to have a place to live. Since the ground around this structure has been a yard for poultry for the last 20-plus years, the earth could really use a rest and a chance to regenerate, so simply building a new structure on the same site is not the best solution. Our hoop-style hen houses on hay wagons have worked remarkably well as summer housing for our laying flock, but it’s too high off the ground for the turkeys (who can be ridiculously silly and lazy).
So Kara has been working diligently to creatively remake one of our old (and no longer highway worthy) trailers into a portable turkey palace. She’s utilizing what was marketed as an ATV shelter as the walls and sides of the new coop. The birds will have space for their food and water, comfortable room for sleeping and sheltering from the weather, and an ample yard outside with our portable electric mesh fence for roaming and foraging before being safely locked up at night. Once the turkeys have eaten up the grass and bugs in their area, we can pull the trailer onto fresh ground, which is much better land management than a permanently fenced “run.”
With a little more work on the doors and mounting the roosts, the turkey trailer home will be ready for action!

High Tunnel Repair
You may remember the story this winter during the extreme cold of January how the plastic film on our 50-foot garden high tunnel shattered. The four-year rated plastic had served us eight seasons, and the fierce wind and -40 temperatures were just too much for it. With an outrageous snow-load soon after, I had had no choice but to climb inside and cut down the rest of the film before the metal hoops and purlins collapsed.
But now with the growing season coming on, it’s time to put a new top on the high tunnel. The plastic is on order, and Mom and Steve have been straightening one section that had been warped by snow-load. It’s the first time in eight years that the ground inside has seen rain, so we took advantage of this moisture saturation by working up the middle bed and planting spinach. We can leave this area untouched even while fastening the new plastic roof, and the crop will harvest out before the intense heat of summer, offering the space for pepper or tomato transplants.
We had originally hoped to plant spinach in the fall and overwinter it in the high tunnel, but that project just hadn’t happened. Good thing—since the shattered plastic roof would have offered no protection to the young crop below, which would have frozen out. Now with the rains coming, those little spinach seeds I planted this afternoon are in the damp earth, just waiting to sprout right now.

The List Continues
These are only two of several dozen projects on deck for 2019. There’s the plan to add a grain bin on the slab that will be vacated by the old turkey coop’s removal, the never-ending task of keeping up with tractor and vehicle repairs, and the necessary addition of a shelter behind the barn for the ewes as they wait to enter the milking parlor. And that still only touches on a few! In the short-term, there’s cleaning up the gardens, spreading compost, and planting, along with preparing for the 180 baby chicks on order. And remember, there’s just four of us!
Coming up I’ll be highlighting some of the things that will be new for Farmstead Creamery this year as well—aspects we’re working hard to create for you to enjoy next time we see you down on the farm.