This is my job today.  Finish it up.  Last week I rototilled the overgrown 15×20′ patch, after strategically removing a few straggling irises.  This week I’ve managed to rake and get down to the deep roots of most of the grasses over half the patch.

Paul with three-prong rake, sheep-based compost and the new potato patch.

Here I am with a barrow of composted sheep-manure plus straw fertilizer/mulch covering the first half of the plot.  Today… the remaining 150 square feet gets derooted and covered.

It truly is lovely filth though.  Very little smell at all, compared to the manure spread on local fields, whether sprayed as a liquid (what liquid is that, exactly?) or thrown from a manure spreader.  I don’t think most farmers really let their manure get composted like this stuff has.  We’re spreading it on thick enough to (hopefully) keep the light out and inhibit the grasses growing back very much until we get potatoes in.

We need new potato patches to help keep the pest population down (those that like to overwinter and be ready to chow down when potatoes come up again).  Anything that helps in this regard is good for me… I take responsibility for much of the potato patch hand pest picking during the growing season.

But that takes me away from this filth.  Lovely filth, from lovely sheep in their lovely barn with their lovely bouncing lambs, who will in turn later this year taste oh so lovely too.  Lovely sheep, lovely compost, lovely vegetables, oh lovely all around.

And now it’s afternoon, and time to end this lovely post and go back to my 150 square feet.  Fortunately, Mandy found me a nicer tool (pictured above, but you can’t really tell) to use, a three-pronged garden weeder with long prongs.  I was using a stiff-pronged garden rake, but it has about a dozen short prongs and is almost impossible to apply with enough force to get deep roots out.  But this three-pronged beauty goes right down and saves me work.  I have high hopes of finishing this bed off by 5pm.

Learning to overwinter greens was one of those lifechanging events for me, when I first started about 6 or 7 years ago.  This year we’ve been eating out of the garden since February, when the hoop tunnels started to yield the first spinach and mache.  A lot of the first salads are as much foraged as cultivated.  In March, our greens featured the spinach & mache, a little overwintered lettuce, violet leaves, a little overwintered kale & chard putting out tiny new leaves, overwintered radiccio, early-emerging sorrel, chervil, parsley, and dandelion greens. A couple planters sown with spindly lettuce and mache, grown on the porch, filled it out.

Dandelions allowed to grow and covered with mulch give blanched tender leaf sprouts with a flavor very similar to Belgian endive, their close relative.  Rather than weed them out, I leave many of them be in the fall, cover them with leaves, and harvest in March and April.

Our banner above, for this season, shows our overwintered “wild baby greens” salad mix.  Lettuce is being planted now, to come in for May and start off at the Westside Farmers Market in June.  :)

One of our lovely egg customers mentioned reading our blog, and I realized how long it had been since we posted.  Spring swooped in and carried us away, out into the yard, under the trees.  We tapped the maple trees, dug in the garden, clipped the first chives, uncovered fabulous overwintered spinach in the tunnel house, watched the chickens happily resume their roams into the shrubbery, with the snow gone.  Even as we delighted in the early heat wave, we uncomfortably realized its cost:  very little sap run for maple syrup this year.

We will not be selling any maple syrup, needless to say.  Last year I wrote about the dangers of warming climate to maple sap production, and this year it feels real.  We had about 5 days of real, useable sap run.  Compared to a more normal 4-6 weeks. It’s hard to be ungrateful to such beautiful weather, but somewhere in my instincts, it felt too warm, too soon.

I almost wrote about it then, but all my words and thoughts felt bitter.  I pictured trucks hauling corn & crates of fake corn-syrupy artificial syrup, coal-energy powered processing plants, and the ingredients of Mrs. Butterworth’s, and felt angry that what is real and good is suffering in order to feed people what is fake and nutritionless.