The sun feels good! It’s been nice to see plants that spend the winter in the ground sprouting up and doing well. With the mild winter that alternated snow and thaw, we weren’t sure how things would overwinter. It’s still unknown whether everything did well….our overwintered onions seem alive but their black plastic ground cover blew off during heavy winds mixed with thawed out soil. A bed of overwintered baby kale (never harvested) looks really nice and we’ll be harvesting from it soon. This year our biennial flowers were planted into beds that were pretty wet this winter….though bulbs like tulips and daffodils are looking good in those same beds.
We left this caterpillar tunnel up all winter so we could plant it earlier in the spring. It was an ideal winter for tunnels (very little snow means very little shoveling snow off the tunnels). We planted into it at the end of February. Most things are still little and growing slowly but we did harvest some salad mix for market last week from it. That bed next to the caterpillar tunnel in the picture above (with the white row cover over it) was where the baby kale lived over the winter. That was all the protection it had.
More caterpillar tunnel plastic has gone up in the last few weeks and we’re already seeing the little seedlings sprouting up!
Every year, we scramble for enough space to house our seedlings before they’re ready for the big world. Bryan built an extra little space this year with a heated bench in the center and a “hardening off” section along the side (where the plastic can roll up).
Our high tunnel has been bursting with greens. These guys lived in there all winter and started really growing as days started getting longer and warmer. We started going back to the Dieppe Market on April 9th this year, a few weeks earlier than we’ve ever gone before. It’s been so great seeing all our awesome friends (customers and other vendors) again!
