February 27, 2019 Winter is a hassle, but . . .

The Winter this year was pretty mild, right up until the beginning of February.

The Groundhog (if it were at the Farm) would have seen his shadow and foretold of six more weeks of Winter. And it would have been right too. The Winter since Groundhog's Day has been horrible. (Stupid Groundhog should have stayed in bed.) Six more weeks of Winter was the Groundhog's forecast, let us all hope so.

Since then there have been many nights of heavy rain, some of it more than three inches. The days following are usually nice, but the mud can be a bit much. The cold mornings bring frost, but the frost melts and makes the mud a bit worse. We put a bunch of hay down to make for a firm footing on the paths, but the hay has slowly sunk into the mud. It is still better than  it was without the hay.

We had snow one night, sufficient to collapse the hoop-house roofs. We repaired them easily, but it has snowed twice since then and this is a worry. We have to  spend the snowy nights paying vigilant attention to keeping the weight of snow off them. We get little sleep on snow nights, but it is pretty out there when the snow falls. Last night is threatened snow all night long, but the stuff didn't show up until around six this morning. As I write this snow is falling and it is very pretty out. But we are melting the snow off of the hoop-house roofs about once every hour just in case.

Yesterday we had winds. Not really fast moving but very heavy and cold, spilling out of the Gorge.  We spent the morning in the greenhouse planting seed for succession crops and sorting strawberries into buckets for replanting. The wind made the job worse, but we got another bunch done. The wind continued all day and all night long, and some of it was pretty scary. The house shook at times during the night but the hoop-houses took it all in stride.

While sorting the frozen berry plants we discussed the problem of re-planting the berries. This problem is more about having a good place for them to go than having plants to go there. So we spent the sorting time talking about how we could distribute the good soil we made (last year) without making a mess or causing future trouble. The soil is very wet, so making a mess is pretty easy to do, and the weight of it makes moving it around a bit of a problem too.

While I was picking plants out of the freezing clay and mud I thought up an idea for a new tractor implement. So after lunch we went into the cold and windy workshop and built it out of scrap wood. The idea was to take the dirt which comes out of the tractor's 48 inch roto-tiller and focus it into a six inch deep and thirty inch wide berm suitable for planting. After we got the thing built, we had to figure a way to get it to trail behind the tractor, and then make a few adjustments to make it to work properly. Eventually the thing worked pretty good.

We moved the good soil out into the feild and just dropped it in piles, then roto-tilled the ground in an east to west direction until it was mixed fluffy and even. Then we put the new tool behind the roto-tilller and ran it in a straight lines in a north to south direction. Following the tire track from the previous run the rows came out wonderfully straight and look great. Each new row is about six inches deep and very well formed. This new tool will easily give us the 750 row feet we will need to put 4500 strawberry plants into the ground, in a meaningful way, before the growing season begins. But the weather simply must calm down a bit before we get out there to plant.

The forecast is for cold and dry all weekend, so we are hopeful. There are still a bunch of plants to sort out and planting in the rain sounds pretty horrible.