The sun is shining and the birds are singing their songs of spring. Today is the first day it’s truly felt like spring for us. We couldn’t be happier, seeing the world around us come to life fills us with so much excitement. Our seed nursery is bursting at the seams with beautiful plants, and now is the dance as we wait until the ground dries out enough to begin working the soil, sowing seeds in the fields and transplanting crops. In the warm and sunny seeding room today we potted up our tomatoes and peppers into much bigger containers, allowing them to keep thriving and growing until the weather runs no risks of cold. We are looking forward to sowing and transplanting cold hardy crops outside soon since the weather looks favorable. We are going to be using row cover for our early crops, which enables us protect them from any chance of damaging cold weather. It also provides a climate similar to 100 miles south of Barnstead. This week we’re looking forward to finishing mulching both garlic plots with baleage. We’ve come to love this material as a great thick mulch for a variety of uses. It’s heavy weight allows the material to stay put even in Barnstead’s strong wind bursts, because it’s fermented it has no vital weed seeds, it holds moisture very well, it’s easy to remove if necessary, it promotes mycelium colonies, it decomposes incredibly fast helping building soil, and it’s readily available and quite cheap where we are. We are anticipating the garlic to pop up out of the soil in no time and we need to make sure it’s protected from the competing weeds! Finally, we are seeing more signs of spring!
