Compressed Spring

According to the news this morning, soil temperatures are running about ten degrees cooler than normal, or about two weeks behind their normal schedule. The same would timeframe holds true for spring rainfall, as well. The resulting compression of the spring farming season means we have to take maximum advantage of every opportunity to get in the field and do some farming.

We awoke on May Day to the distinct possibility that we could get some farming done, but we knew we had only a brief window in which to work. I jumped on the tractor, hooked up the rototiller (Our tiller resembles a garden tiller in its action, but at five feet wide it covers significantly more ground. We once covered two acres with a garden tiller, but that was no fun at all.) Up on the ridge, I tilled up the onion patch, and made my way through a new contour strip that we carved out of a rye cover crop. In our lower fields – which usually dry out more quickly than the ridges – almost everything was still too wet to till. I made a couple of futile tries at tilling, but soils tilled too wet just turn to clumps of messiness for the rest of the year, and I quite before I did any serious damage. By Thursday night we had a little rain, and Friday brought quite a bit more.

Saturday and Sunday, we took the opportunity to do some catch up work in the greenhouse. We’re running a little short-staffed right now, so a few things have risked falling behind. The majority of our summer crew starts over the next couple of weeks. Kim potted up the rosemary cuttings (with twelve year-old son Oliver’s and six year-old Isabel’s help), the peppers, and a few tomatoes; seeded our crop of Brussels sprouts; and moved a bunch of stuff outside to harden off – and make more room in the greenhouse! Our delayed spring has had the effect of shrinking our greenhouse space, as we wait to move things outside or into the field, while plantings continue to pile up. I did a major service on our mid-sized tractor, which we call the Mama K, since every tractor we own now was made by Kubota (a Japanese company that paints their tractors orange). Zane, our sixteen year-old, and his friend Justin, restacked some pallets of fence posts and tomato stakes that had sat in our front yard since we moved them for a bulldozing project at Thanksgiving; it felt good to get rid of that mess. Zane also greased up some moving parts on the greenhouse.

By Monday morning, we had over thirty-six hours forecast free of rain, and the soil was almost dry. Starting at the crack of dawn, I spread about three tons of chicken compost fertilizer on our early fields, and then grabbed the tiller to re-till the onion field. Meanwhile, we hooked up the transplanter to the Papa K (a tractor we bought last summer which is big enough, and slow enough, to handle the transplanter, which weighs about three-thousand pounds full of water), loaded the van with onion plants, hooked up a trailer with a tank of water to the van, and headed up to the onion field for a full day of transplanting. Kim and returning-employee Lucas rode the transplanter and plugged in about twelve thousand onion plants.

Tuesday dawned drier still, with some of the lower fields finally ready to work. Unable (unwilling?) to sleep, I again hit the fields before the sun comes up. Although I have a carefully-arranged rotation plan from last August, I had to abandon it more-or-less completely to organize our plantings around the realities of an exceedingly wet spring. We have to plant the carrots somewhere! So, if we move the peas up above, and move the celeriac over there, and put the shallots up above, we can squeeze the carrots into this dry spot here! After tilling, Kim and I tag-teamed two seeders and two tractors to seed carrots, dill, cilantro, spring turnips, radishes, arugula, mustard greens, chicories, snap peas, and snow peas.

When we finished seeding, I mowed down some rye and hairy vetch covers so that I can till them in at the next dry stretch. If we can’t get into the field for a while, the rye could get overly-stemmy and become difficult to incorporate. Then I put on the field cultivator, which drags shovels through the soil to loosen things up, and leaves nice ridges that dry out quickly after the rain I see coming over the horizon. Every bit of bare soil in the lower fields gets a pass before the first drops of rain, big and cold, come down just as we start to lose the light. I drive the Mama K a little too fast over the bumpy field roads, drop the field cultivator off the tractor, and drive a little too fast again up to park the tractor in the top of the barn. I dash to the greenhouse to close the peak vent and roll down the sides, then run to the house just before everything lets loose and in less than five minutes, I know we’ll be out of the field for at least two more days. Having worked from can’t see to can’t see for two days straight, I collapse on the couch to enjoy a Netflix episode of MacGyver before a full night’s sleep. On Wednesday morning, I sleep in a little bit, knowing that spinach harvest, unlike tilling, can proceed in a bit of rain.