From the Get Go: Season Prep 101

We’re back on the farm almost 2 months earlier than we showed up last year and getting a much bigger picture of what it takes to run a successful mid-size farm.  In 2010 we started work the last week of May, only 1 week before harvest and deliveries started for the CSA, farmer’s markets, and wholesale accounts.   That means that the bulk of the fence repair, tilling, bed prep, transplanting, direct seeding, and first big weeding flush were already done by the time we came on the scene.  The farm was already in full swing, and we jumped right in. 

This year, because we showed up at the beginning of April instead of the end of May, we’re getting some feeling for what the “warm up” to full swing production feels like. When we arrived 10 days ago, the farm looked and felt much as it did when we left at the end of October.  None of the fields had been tilled, nothing planted, no fences repaired.  This is not to say that work hadn’t taken place. Lots and lots of seeds have been started – both Jan and Tim’s basement and the basement at our Little House are full of seedlings at various stages of growth.  Broccoli, tomatoes, lettuces, spinach, cabbage, and a variety of herbs are inside getting a head start.  The lion’s share of the marketing and planning for the season were done over the winter. Conferences were attended, equipment was purchased. The time for the more cerebral parts of farming happens during “slow” winter season – ideally one wants to think through, plan out and write down the entire growing season well before it even starts. 

So, here we are at the very start of the season, almost 2 full months before we actually harvest and sell anything.  And boy do we have a list of things to do.  High on the priority list is to finish the hoop house we started building last fall.  The planting plan calls for tomatoes to be in the ground under the cover of this structure two weeks from now, and here it stands:  

Doors hung, frame built. Now we wait for the calmest of calm days to come around so we can drape the thing in a piece of plastic 100 feet long and 100 feet wide.  We’re also making compost piles with the heaps of manure that have collected in the barns over the winter from the chickens and the horse and trying to get some cover crops in the fields that won’t be planted until May or June.  Also potting on broccoli and tomatoes and steadily filling the greenhouse with bigger seedlings.  Definitely no shortage of stuff to do.  I realize as I’m writing this how utterly mundane and boring it could all seem, but want to assure all you lovely reader how cool is all is to us. Eli and I feel like we are in such a prime learning phase, and are pretty excited by it all. You should have seen the smiles when the compost pile hit 170 degrees this morning!

I’ll end with two pictures – the first is what a hand should look like at the end of the day, and the second is a sample of the exciting weather we had here last night (look hard in the upper righthand corner). Be well everybody!