What's New At The Farm? 4/08/09

Spring has sprung! The birds are back and the ice is on its way out. A couple more days and the ice will be gone. New signs of spring are popping up daily and it’s great to see. Peepers are out. The tulips and daffodils are pushing their way up as is the rhubarb and the buds are swelling on the trees. Another week will bring more rakers out as the ground dries up even more.

We have six geese at the farm pond this year; I don’t know if they’ll nest here this year or not. They usually have a nest on the neighbors then graze on us but with the new deer fence coming between I don’t know what they’ll do. Guess we’ll have to wait and see. Doesn’t hurt my feelings one way or the other.

We planted peppers on Monday this week, in greenhouse # 3. Also on tap to be planted this week is lettuce, Chinese cabbage, eggplant and radicchio. It’s nice to get some stuff planted and growing; it’s been such a long winter. The spinach in the poly tunnel is just about gone by as is some lettuce out there. We’ll grind it up this week and replant some salad greens.

The fields are greening up slowly; the winter rye has some color in it now and with the rain scheduled for this week it’ll green up even more. Everything else looks pretty dead. Oh, yeah, there’s some other things greening up like the red clover we planted in the sweet corn last July and the chickweed: a true harbinger of spring and some lawn grass on the sheltered side of the buildings. We’ve got to get the lawn raking done before the grass gets very tall or it won’t be any fun at all; not that it’s a whole lot of fun anyways, but one job that is better with short grass and without blackflies.

The ice is getting thin on our irrigation pond. It’s gone around the edges and getting pretty thin in the middle. I saw a bass lurking in the shallows last week trying to get some warmth going, I imagine. They’ll be spawning soon, or at least start the building of their nests. Spawning usually takes place in May here; once the water warms up. Of course that’s when we’re the busiest; trying to get everything into the ground. There’s some controversy about fishing for bass on their spawning beds, but I doubt in a farm pond it makes much difference, and their definitely easy to catch.

We’ve plenty of seed production here at the Johnny’s farm this year. We didn’t have any last year but have at least ten tomatoes this year; that’ll keep us busy. Usually we harvest tomatoes for seed in September but as we didn’t have any last year, we had some time on our hands. If it doesn’t move paint it and if it does move put it somewhere. Everything that wasn’t nailed down got a coat of paint. Some things, just little projects that we never seem to get to do got done: the greenhouses and their matching fuel tanks got stenciled with numbers. Now we can track how much fuel each one uses. The fuel tank got a new coat of white paint; we can actually see it now. The fuel tank also got its own roof to keep out the weather. Glad we did most of those projects last fall; we won’t have extra time this year.

Until next week, Brian