April 11, 2021 Spring has Sprung

 The past week or so have been a bit cold at night and in the shade, but warm and lovely in the sunshine. This isn't the essence of Spring, but it is close enough for working on the Farm. The real beginning of Spring is the day you can smell the dirt and this only happened today. So I suppose today is the first day of true Spring, the day when planting is due to start, but where frost might still happen. 

We are preparing for planting every day now. Ann and I put up the new greenhouse in past weeks, but this week we actually built a few of the planting benches we will use to populate the gardens with growing things. 

Ann and our friend Ellen spent Thursday morning planting the first flats of seeds. Inside the Greenhouse the weather is about eighty or so degrees during the day, the trick to sprouting to not let the flats fall below seventy degrees at night. Once the seeds have sprouted the baby leaves we will move the flats to the table's lower shelves where there is a good amount of artificial lighting installed. The lower shelf plants will grow rather quickly there because the lighting will extend the growing day six hours, solving the problem of growing at the bottom of the Apple Valley.

I spent a few days opening up the dirt in the Market Garden this week, having done the same in the Kitchen Garden a few weeks ago. A light tilling of the soil cleans the gardens up pretty well. I am tilling just deep enough to kill off any weeds, but not so deep that it brings more weed seeds to the top,  This is the third year of planting so the soils are in very good shape. Where needed I am tilling in a good amount of compost, but the soils really don't need it. In a few weeks I will begin pulling the dirt into elevated rows for planting, about the time Ann's baby plants are ready to go from the Greenhous and into dirt. Ann will plant potatoes pretty soon, but right now she is spending more time cleaning up the Strawberries for May and June harvest. It is going to be a good year.

Part of our farm infrastructure plan is to put a permanent water system into the ground and I finally got the main thing done early last week. There are now four frost free landscape hydrants along a one inch pipe extending both directions from our well and into both main gardens. These are simple things, but a bit expensive. The hydrants will remove the need for the super long hoses we have used for the past three years. Eventually we will put automatic watering in, but that day has not arrived yet. 

Laffee Taffee's puppies are growing by leaps and bounds. This past week their eyes opened and they have begun toddling around the whelping pen. Taffee is a great mother, she never goes far from the babies, but she has begun loosening up and spending more time outside with the other dogs. 

Our Daffodils all opened up a few weeks ago, this past week the tulips and Narcissus flowers all opened. In the beds where they live they sort of look small when compared with the size of the Farm, but there are a whole lot of them planted out there. The row in this picture is maybe sixty feet long and there is also twenty-nine Peonies planted in there too. We are propagating the thousands of bulbs needed for the gardens and today we are about a third of the way along in the process. It is nice to have some color out in the gardens.

The house build is moving along well. The drywall is almost all installed and I have been working on the taping a few days a week while we get the Farm ready for Spring. I will be spending a great deal more time on the house in the next few weeks, but with only seven rooms total, and two nearly finished already, I should be able to get through it by mid-May.

There has been a great deal of Spring traffic here lately. Rodents came along and the dogs really loved chasing them out. Our covey of wild Quail are out there on the East fence-line. I think their numbers have doubled since they decided to live there. We have fourteen or so wild songbirds living here now, mostly because we put out food for the Chickens and Ducks. We even had a Great Blue Heron land in a tree last evening while we were out walking the Farm. The big bird made the chickens cluck and run.

Life on the Farm is good, but it's also getting better.