Thinking Spring

With the warmer weather recently, who wouldn’t be thinking spring? Instead of frozen and packed hard, the mud squishes beneath my chore boots, and the smell of the earth returns to the air. Migratory birds return, including our pair of Sandhill cranes that just flew over yesterday, calling from up high before drifting ever closer to the field that serves as home for their annual chick rearing.

The gardens emerge from the crusty snow, lumpy and bleak, with a few skeletal remains of stalky weeds I didn’t get out before the ground froze last fall. The strawberry plants are still tucked under their cushy bed of hay and straw—certainly still far too early to dare unearth these tender plants. We all know this weather is a taste of what’s to come, but we’re in for some more chilliness before winter gives up its grip.

Folks making maple syrup must be busy, even though this is all coming rather early. The sunny days also brought out customers to Farmstead that were ready to break out of their cabins, dust off their bicycles, head for the trails, and soak up the springtime feeling. Some were greeted by my honeybees, which pulled through the mild winter, and are now prowling about for anything that might satisfy their hunger for spring. Right now, that means a jar of sugar water, but hopefully it won’t be too long before the first dandelions emerge—a crucial first nectar and pollen crop for the bees.

In the garden, Kara dug up the rest of the storage carrots before they got any notions of sprouting, and we spent two days washing them up for farmer’s market. Everywhere was bright orange roots, all sweet and crispy from the damp, cool soil. The seeds have all arrived from Johnny’s in Maine and the potato order is in at Feed and Seed, but it’s still too early for most of those project.

Except…in the aquaponics, brassicas like broccoli and cauliflower are already started in seedling trays, as well as tomatoes. They can’t go outside quite yet, but the tomatoes will go through several transplantings before going into the ground to give them an extra head-start boost for our short growing season. But the first outdoor planting for us is in our high tunnel at the north end of the raised bed garden.

Home to tomatoes until the last big freeze of November finally reduces the plants to skeletons, it has sat waiting. Now, as a balmy southern breeze drifts by, we roll up the sidewalls to let in the fresh air and attack with gloves and scissors, tearing down the bailing twine trellising and hauling away the moldy debris. We pull up the tattered red plastic mulch and rake up any fallen tomato leaves, weed bits, or dehydrated green tomato disks (which look like some alien species after being freeze-dried all winter), leaving clean, cool, dark soil.

Then comes out the broadfork, with its two handles and stepping bar to bring lift to the soil and mix in last year’s decomposing organic matter that we hauled in by countless bucketloads. Worms are already active here, though sluggish, and the stagnant moldy smell of the old plants gives way to the fresh smell of turned earth and humus. We pull out any residual weeds and smooth the beds for planting.

A useful tool we invested in several years ago is a six-row seeder carried by Johnny’s Select Seeds that was pioneered by Eliot Coleman of Maine and his pioneering greenhouse techniques.

Proper seed spacing can be an interesting challenge when you’re covering a larger area (our high tunnel is 12 by 50 feet), and with raised beds, plant spacing can be compacted in a carpet known as “square foot gardening” rather than just in rows with wide spacing in between. Paying for and maintaining a greenhouse like a high tunnel makes that soil real estate precious, with every inch counting for growing potential.

While the seeder was a relatively pricy garden implement (when not in use it lives in the house, not in the shed!), it has several exciting features. The front roller smooths the bed, seeds are placed in hoppers, which can be adjusted for seed size and frequency within a row. The seeds fall down their own trenching device, and the trenches are then covered up by the back roller. This back roller powers the seeder via a rubber belt that can be adjusted to produce the right spacing requirements for your seeding.

Once a bed is properly prepared (be sure to pull out sticks, stones, weed roots, and any clumpy organic matter), fill the hoppers on the seeder and push through the beds. No stooping over, no trenching, no covering up seeds. It’s all done! This year, we prepped part of the beds for starting our onion, leek, and shallot seeds (we start from seeds rather than sets) and planted the rest in a mix of radishes and spinach. As the radishes are pulled, it leaves more space for the spinach to grow larger—creating a double crop.

As the day waned and the high tunnel was transformed into its springtime freshness, Mom and Kara and I snaked in a garden hose to give the little seeds a good dosing of water to kickstart the germination process. It feels good to be putting seed in the ground, even if the bulk of that work is still a little way off. It’s a sure sign that spring is coming, and with it lambing season, baby chicks, and all the earmarks of a new growing season. Hope you’re feeling the happiness of thinking spring too! See you down on the farm sometime.

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