With sunlight until nearly 8 p.m. now and the snow piles finally gone, we are back in full outdoor farming mode! Yeehaw! The spring feels slow this year, or maybe it is right on time, but we’ve been thrown off the past couple years with early, warm starts. The fields are without snow and frost is out in first few feet, but soil is still saturated with moisture and very mucky. I hope that we can get in and plant the first crops by late April…perhaps that will really be more like early May this year.
The greenhouse is a lovely, full green place though and onions, leeks, herbs, lettuces, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbages, kohlrabi, baby bok choi, celery, celery root, basil and more are all in various stages of growing or sprouting. New seeds are laid in fresh soil every day for more and more sprouts! It’s makes me joyful to see all the cheerful seedlings saluting up at you out of their flats, especially after surviving the 100″ of snow we received this winter. There is hope after all!!!
Hoophouse soil is slowly drying out as well and dandelions are beginning to grow and flower in there. We’ve been munching on the baby dandelion greens and they are oh so tasty to our winter tongues. The dandy greens are really good for you, so check out your yard or other organic places to pick some for your next salad. Below are some photos of our newest hoophouse that we put the finishing touches on last fall. It’s a quality structure (a PT-30 from Poly-Tek for all you geeks out there) and we hope to be growing more than dandelions in there soon! 
Spring greens are slated to go in any day now (whenever the soil dries out!) and summer tomatoes will follow those. It is quite a production to put one of these babies up. It is 30 ft wide by 72 ft long and we took most of the summer to slowly construct it in our seldom free moments. We plan to put up a couple more eventually but we feel like it is an every other year project. By the time a year has passed, you forget how much time and work it is to put one up, so you say, ‘hey, let’s do that again so we can grow more awesome tomatoes!’ And repeat.
Adam, along with our 2010 employees, Lars and Chris, appear in the photos below… We’re trying to stretch the hoophouse plastic as tight as possible before securing permanently so that the plastic wouldn’t sag this winter with the snow and ice and get flapped around in the wind. Mission accomplished as our plastic is still as tight as can be and survived the great snow winter of ’10-’11.
Hoophouse #2 is finished!!! Inside you can see our Thanksgiving spinach that we planted.
Thanks to everyone for checking out the blog again after a long winter hiatus! Happy Spring!!!
