Life is getting real busy down on the farm

We've started working in the greenhouse seeding flats of kales, lettuces, and swiss chards. Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are sown in shallow seed pans and will get potted up to a larger pot size when they've made some more growth. New plantings/sowings are made weekly to try to time it so each kind of transplant is at the right stage of growth when the weather is appropriate to transplant them to the field. This means waves of sometimes sequential sowings.
We have been working at creating new compost piles, turning compost piles, and spreading compost onto various farm fields as the weather permits. Even though our spreader looks like it holds lots of compost in it- it takes a surprising number of trips and time to apply compost to even one of our fields. This job must be done when it is dry enough to both load the compost and make it through the fields without making ruts or cause damaging compaction to wet soils (very bad).
Our elderly skid steer machine that we are using to create the compost piles and load compost is a marvelous machine (pictured above) but it seems to have almost daily problems. I think we have worked on just about every aspect of the machine by now- surely we are about to the point where nothing else will fall off or break on a daily basis.
We just received 1 3/4" of rain over the last three days (much better than the 2-4 inches predicted). We will likely need to wait for three or four days for the soil to dry out enough to resume our compost dispersal project. We have plenty of other projects to keep us more than busy at this time of year. Though everything needs to be done in proper order and in a timely fashion so we can keep moving forward.
We're all praying for moderation in the weather. Seasonal temperatures, sunshine, and a slight breeze during the day would be perfect. But then, how often do we really get perfect?
The first sowing of peas and spinach is beginning to peak their heads out of the soil now.
Karen

Thoughts of planting.....

I thought I'd post a picture from last year- as a reminder that good things are coming. We'll soon be planting again. In the meantime, here's a picture of long rows, soon to be harvested. Everyone keep thinking good thoughts of Spring!

This is it- no more snow!

We got the ladders dug out of the snow pack and the van removed from its snowy resting spot on Tuesday afternoon. The snow is disappearing quickly and we enjoyed some lovely, sunny days of pruning this week. With the use of our new found ladders we were able to prune the tops as well as bottoms of the trees. The rain we're scheduled to have will wash this snow away completely. Good riddance! We look forward to lots of sunny days with moderate temperatures and not too windy please. There is still plenty of pruning to do in the apples and once finished we can start on the cleanup. Then, there is always the peach orchard to prune and then the raspberries and blackberries after that. Oh yeah- don't forget the greenhouse work, compost application, plowing, and other field work. Spring is closing in fast.
Karen

Ahh- To Prune Again

We've been pruning in the apples for the last couple of days now. How lovely to be outside and have the sun shining! The snow pack has melted substantially, but it is suprising to see that it is still a couple off feet deep where it really drifted in the orchards. Our orchard ladders, which we carefully laid on the ground but propped up on some prunings before all this snow came, have still not appeared through the drifts. As luck has it, it looks like the biggest drifts are exactly where we left our ladders. We like to prune a whole tree at a time from the bottom to the top with a person on either side of the row. If it is really windy or wet we sometimes just do the bottoms, then come back later to do the tops. It's no fun being blown off a ladder or getting your gloves wet or muddy when it is cold out. So, since we couldn't get up to the ladders we've been working on the bottoms of the trees where we can get to them. We're still walking on a fair amount of snow and have skipped over some areas because the lower scaffold limbs of the trees are still drifted over. I think we could have lost a VW Beetle in some of the deepest drifts between the apple and peace orchards this year. Yesterday I got our van stuck in the snow still left in the access road. I thought I could blast through what I thought was 5" of snow tot the bare spot 40' away. Turns out it was more like 16" deep. We'll talk up today and take a couple of shovels so we can get the van out and find the buried ladders too. I drove to Downingtown a couple of days ago and was quite surprised to see the snow was almost all gone there. With these temps and some sun shine it's just a matter of time. I bet come July and August we'll be thinking more fondly of snow piles.
Karen

Still the snow won't GO!

This afternoon I tried, again, to plow to the top of the hill for easier access to the orchards. This time I managed to make it without getting the truck stuck in a drift, but I did manage to slide off the road a few times, and I couldn't make it all the way to the top. I did, however, manage to get a decent path plowed to the peaches, which will reduce the amount of walking Karen has to do to get to the apples. Unfortunately, the trees that still need to be pruned are a good distance from the plowed part of our access road, and the pruning ladders have yet to emerge from the snowbank!

Ah, well. Spring is coming (or so I'm told....._)

Jeff