It’s “go time” here at the farm. Everything has to happen at once this time of year. We are planting more than 20 flats of veggies a week, tending to hundreds of baby starts, getting the water system up and running, fixing torn plastic and bent hoop house pipes and putting the systems in place that will help us get through the season.
That’s enough, for sure. But on top of all that, however, are the expansion projects. This year, we are making our processing room bigger too accommodate a greens bubbler – essentially a giant jacuzzi for our salad greens. It’s going to be awesome, but it is also a 100-gallon tank, so we have to make room for it. At the same time, given the state of the world today and our desire to be as safe as possible for our customers, we are putting in a new floor so we can wash it down and keep everything clean and bright. But we’ve run into a little snag — ice.
One of the reasons our processing room is so great is that it faces the north so it’s nice and cool most of the day. Unfortunately, that also means the ground underneath it is a solid block of ice. Two years ago, when we dug down to put in our walk-in cooler in late June, there was still a foot of ice to chop through. This year, we ran into solid ground only a few inches down, and chiseling out the spots for the concrete footers has been rather challenging. Still, we are proceeding forward with axes and lots of caffeine because it really can’t wait. Before we know it, our days will be filled up with harvesting and planting and one way or another, we must be ready to go.
One thing we can’t move forward with yet, however, is breaking new ground in our outdoor fields. We’ve been gradually expanding our outdoor space each year and this year, with the increased demand, my plans call for an additional 60-by-100-foot outdoor space to plant into. It’s a big project. First, we have to till the new ground with a tractor. Then we build the beds with our walk-behind tractor, the BCS, which has an implement called a rotary plow that tosses the soil up into raised beds for us. Until the BCS came along, we built all those beds by hand. That was an insane amount of work and I’m very happy to let a machine do that earth moving from now on. Then we amend the beds with a lot of lime and some things to improve our nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium levels, like greensand and fishbone meal. Lastly, we level everything off and put in our drip tape waterlines and landscape fabric. Oh, and there’s that issue of expanding the fence, too.
It’s a lot of work, so we are eager to get at it. We like to plant into the outdoor gardens in late May, and that’s just a few weeks away, so it would be great to get started on this large project. But for now, we will just have to wait. The ground is frozen solid and no amount of wishing is going to change that. These are the moments I wish my farm was a little lower in elevation, or located in a warmer part of the world. But then, the carrots wouldn’t be as sweet and the chard wouldn’t have that amazing flavor, and we wouldn’t have the same fabulous view.
There are silver linings to everything, I guess, even frozen ground. It makes us slow down, focus ourselves, get better at planning and preparation for that moment when the soil warms enough for us to proceed. It’s the natural rhythm of this land and we must respect it. There’s a deeper lesson in there somewhere, about our place in it all. Farmers don’t grow food, we just help it along. It’s a team effort. So, we wait, as patiently as possible.
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