A follow-up to last week’s newsletter after these brief messages.
We still have a few shares left. It would be nice to finally sell them and no longer talk about them so if you no longer want to hear me say “we have shares left” please consider buying a few to add to your collection. You can never eat too many vegetables.
While you are at it why not collect the whole set? You can add fruit, coffee, mushrooms, flowers, eggs, and a storage share. Trade them with your friends!
Speaking of friends, if you have one or more ask them to buy a share or two. That’s what friends are for. We will credit your account $25 for your trouble.
We are still planning on planting potatoes this Saturday April 24 from 1:00 until done. We have a couple of new ways to plant the potatoes. It will be interesting to see if we have improved the process. All are welcome. No age limit. There are different tasks that require different skills so don’t think you won’t be valuable! Plus we have a lot of distance for socializing! Let me know if you can make it.
Farm News
In past newsletters I’ve mentioned how we have worked on — and in some cases completed projects — we think will make us more efficient and successful. Well one of the most recent projects has already paid off. I call it the greenhouse snorkel project. It was the main feature of last week’s newsletter. To recap, we installed a duct between our heated greenhouse structure and our unheated cold frame structure to allow heated air to be blown into the cold frame if the temperatures in the cold frame gets too low (it’s a cold frame not a frigid frame). Well, the temperature has already gotten too low. In fact, it was cold enough to makes us move all the plants we planned to plant this week from outside waiting on the acclimation benches back into the cold frame. However before we could do that we had to move the plants in the cold frame back into the greenhouse. And of course before we could do that we had to rearrange the plants in the greenhouse to accommodate the return of their brothers and sisters who were nervously waiting their turn to go play outside the cold frame. It was a game of shuffle the plants. Fortunately with the new snorkel we had enough space in the “heated” structures to hold all the flats of plants we have planted. It is a bit crowded but it makes for a better party!
As we continue to watch the weather forecast we continue to revise our planting schedule. If you asked me a week ago when we’d get started I would have said, “It will be a few weeks. I sense there is some cold coming our way.” Other less seasoned farmers would have planted last week, as I may have done in my earlier farming career. If we had planted last week there is a pretty good chance we’d have lost the plants. It has been in the 20’s here recently. Sure a well acclimated broccoli plant can weather mid-20’s temperatures. But a recently transplanted broccoli could struggle to survive. And we don’t like to make our plants struggle. Besides, there is still room in its cell to continue to grow — we do our first broccoli in larger cell trays than our later broccoli just for this situation. So putting it back in the sorta heated cold frame keeps it growing and allows us time to revise our schedule, which we continue to do.
As of two nights ago the forecast looked to warm up by Thursday with overnight lows in the upper 30’s. Yesterday’s forecast had a below freezing temperature on Saturday night. Today, the Saturday night’s forecast is above freezing — 33 degrees. Hopefully the warming trend continues. Despite the colder nighttime temps on Saturday, it won’t affect our potato planting, but we are currently leaning toward starting outdoor transplanting next week. Putting the plants in the ground this week may not make the harvest start any sooner but certainly risks the health of the plants. So unless the forecast changes again (of course it will change, who am I kidding?) in a positive direction we’ll put off the planting until next week and say “Goodbye” to an early start to the season.
So other than shuffling plants around we are also getting the fields ready for planting, getting the hoop house (another unheated but far larger structure than the cold frame) ready for planting, getting the equipment ready for planting and getting our psyche ready for planting. When the weather says “Go!” we will be ready to plant!
As always, do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, suggestions, jokes and brain teasers. If I don’t get any new jokes soon I will have to resort to reusing all my old jokes.