This weekend’s weather was beautiful, in the 60s and delightful for gardening in short sleeves, and for getting the first taste of sunburn.  Earlier in the week though, we planted out a bed where we weren’t using our sprouts from the living room, but instead sowing tiny seeds in long rows.

The weather was alternating between overcast sunny and scudding cloudy, but the wind was constantly whipping us this way and that.  We in our winter coveralls laid things out the bed, and I learned a new trick.

We got the bed ready, and M started laying out the rows the way she does, with a board making tiny Vees in the soil.  I added the steel wire hoops across the bed, about every 18″.  Then we unrolled a fresh piece of row cover cloth, long enough to make it easy to fasten down at each end after the last hoops.

Usually we plant the seeds and cover them and then put the row cover cloth over the hoops.  But it was so windy there was no way we could keep the seeds from blowing away, so on went the row cover first.  Then M ducked her head under the cover’s edge on one side of the row while I held on to it (and took a picture one handed).

Won’t tell you what we were planting though.  Secret stuff.  You’ll get to see it later this summer, at the market we hope.  Some of it.  The other is even more secret, and we’ll all have to wait until late next fall, or even early winter before we know for sure how it comes out.  But the seeds of this secret are planted.

We spent most of yesterday in the gardens, digging out grasses, planting out lettuces, readying other beds for more of the same. Two tables in the living room are taken up with sprouts under grow lights, and the porch overflows. Conservatively Mandy has 5000 plants growing in pots and/or already planted out.

It is so nice now to be eating fresh greens every day, and sometimes at two meals a day already. Fried eggs on a bed of baby greens, mmmm.

Coldframe littuces getting some fresh air. Missing ones in the middle have been planted out in the new bed, top left.

Two days ago I found Mandy planting out some rows of 3-4″ tall deer’s tongue lettuce… I didn’t recognize them from the sprouts she’d been growing. Instead, these had been planted as seed last fall outside and then covered with a cold frame… a small garden spot about 3′ by 3′ with a hay bale back end, bricks and hay sides, and a south-facing 50-year old wooden window frame to make a tiny greenhouse. All winter the lettuces sat there mulling things over, and in the past two months of slow spring they came out of hibernation. Now they’re so crowded that she took out just two handfuls and filled rows of lettuce sprouts ready to grow big and strong.

And much more to do in the garden.  Mmmmm.  Recently we’ve been doing a lot, as is our wont in April, weather and circumstances permitting.

Red, red newbarb.

There’s rhubarb to discover under the leaves, to expose and (for some of them) to cover under ceramic pots.  We get nice long juicy stalks with less energy going into making big big leaves.  The first of the season though (the newbarbs) are just so red and beautiful and luscious.  Rhubarb custard does not last long around here.  Very nice with coffee for first breakfast (before the eggs and greens).

Last week, not in our gardens but a few steps away in the hens’ free-range territory, I found a patch of white tucked away in the barbs of the black raspberry patch.  We hadn’t seen it before, but there it was, a nice patch of Bloodroot flowers.  I haven’t tried breaking off a stem to see the reddish juices inside.  They’re just too nice.  And the hens have completely ignored them, it seems to me.  They might know something I don’t about bloodroot’s flavor (or perhaps the aftereffects).

And finally, inside, we find Sassy expressing her innermost desire for the high diving board.  Nearly every day she finds a comfy spot and assumes a near-10 quality tuck position in her sleep, dreaming of her splash-free pool entry at the bottom.  May we all have such dreams to tuck into as we sleep.

Diver cat, tuck position.

Last night I picked our supper salad out of the garden by the last dim light after the sun went down.  Earlier in the day I had quickly planted seeds by the first morning light before heading off to the other job.  Farming around another job can be a challenge.  My work -midwifery-  is unpredictable.  Sometimes the long day in the office is the only day that week the sun shines, and all the other days I’m available to work in the gardens it rains or freezes.  Sometimes I’m at a birth for two days during a critical time for sprouting young plants.  Sometimes a really busy week of births, office visits, and home postpartum visits leaves no time outside during the exact week plants or seeds need to go into the ground.

So just as midwives do with all the other parts of their lives, I’ve learned how to adapt, adjust, make do, and use contingency plans to get established the gardens that will feed us and others.  In the process I’ve broken a lot of “rules”.  I was thinking about this yesterday as I was hurrying to plant the peas in the early morning, before either shower or breakfast.

One of the processes I’ve come to depend upon is soaking seeds.  Soaking seeds before planting is just wetting them down in a bowl of water for awhile to either hydrate them more quickly, speed up germination, or wash away a sprout-inhibiting surface coating of the seed.  Soaking has pitfalls.  It can lead to seed rotting if the soak is too long (or forgotten…).  But the payoff for me has been that tender germinating seeds that need to have their soil kept to a particular dampness grow much faster after soaking - eliminating a good deal of the time that I need to be on-call to the garden to go water a drying-out seedbed on a hot spring day.  Last year, we had nearly no carrots. Fortunately, we had a huge squash and pumpkin harvest, and made do with these for the majority of our orange food intake.  But I planted carrots over and over again, and a bad combination of a hot and unpredictable spring and a busy midwifery practice calling me away for extended amounts of time meant that the little carrot seeds, notorious for the length of time they take to germinate, did not grow well.  This year, I’m trying something different, and soaking the carrot seeds to cut down on their germination time, and cut down on the amount of time I have to coddle them to get them to sprout.

I soaked the carrot seed overnight, then drained them through a fine mesh strainer and took them out to the garden.   A skeptical old-school farmer would look at me like I was crazy and say, well now you’ve just got a mess of wet seeds you’re not going to be able to spread - what about that?   No problem.  I sprinkle some dry soil over them, and stir.  Just like mixing sand with small dry seeds to help sow them more thinly.  Then I sprinkle the seed-dirt mix in the rows.  Sometimes soil clings to the seeds just right so that they look like those pelleted seeds you can buy, with a protective coating that makes each seed easier to pick up.  Except, with soil, you can’t really see the seed anymore.  It’s a little leap of faith to sprinkle the cupful of dirt with seeds you can’t see down the row, and assume you’ve done okay.  But it has worked really well for me in the past.

This is the method I’ve used this year so far for beets, chard, carrots, spinach, mache, and peas planted outside.  Somewhere I think I read that beets and chard have a sprout-inhibiting chemical on their surface, that soaking washes away more quickly than watering in the ground does.  I don’t have a lot of time to spend researching and following up on the science, I just experiment, and then add to my repertoire what has worked for me.  I also read somewhere that you should “never” soak your peas or beans because it hydrates them too fast, causing cracking and breaking up of the seeds.  I think it’s possible that I experienced this once, but soaking has also worked really well for me for peas.  To be on the safe side, I don’t just soak them overnight, I hydrate and sprout them the same way you would grow homegrown sprouts in a jar - a brief soak, then pour the water off but keep jar mouth covered by a damp cloth, and rinse a few times a day, for 2 or 3 days.

Why bother with the pre-sprouting for peas?  Well, peas have been a special challenge for me.  We have a lot of moles in this part of the world, and I have battled moles over peas for years.  They love them.  Peas are mole-candy.  They will dig right down under the surface of the row and eat them all.  Anything they don’t find, I’ve seen birds digging out of the soil from above.  I have tried all sorts of things - burying chicken wire in the soil around the peas (what a mess), planting in zigzaggy rows  and unpredictable clumps (they found them anyway), and two things that worked:  Burying big pots in the soil, and planting the peas in that (perfect barrier, but very limited space), and starting the peas in an old section of eavestrough/gutter, that they slide right out of in a short pre-made row after they’ve grown a couple inches (still labor intensive, and limited row length).  The rest of the peas that I plant in the ground directly simply do best pre-sprouted to get a chance of growing beyond seed stage before the moles find them.  Pre-sprouted seeds have to be handled really gently, so as not to break their sprouts.  This is no problem for me, but I can see how some might be uncomfortable with it.  I consciously cultivate fine motor skills, gentle touch, and touch sensitivity that is so useful in both my jobs.  I can plant out a bunch of fifty tangled two inch-high seedlings I’ve started in one container in the house without damaging their tender stems or roots, but it might not make sense for big-handed callous-fingered farmer guys or caffeine-shaky hands!

The other great thing about all this seed prep work is that it can be done indoors when it’s not light outside.  If I’ve come home too late to make it out to plant, I can still start seeds soaking indoors to be ready for an early morning planting, or I can plant seeds in flats that will grow indoors just until they are big enough to transplant.

The year's first chives - one of the first things up

Everywhere around me, people are seeming disgusted with the weather.  It’s too cold for them.  They post facebook statuses addressed directly and sarcastically to “dear spring”, expressing displeasure, they decide not to go out yet.  I am the odd one out.  I do not mind a slow spring.

In fact, some of the recent fast-and-hot springs really freaked me out.  After living in the same general part of the world all my life, something in my bones felt like it’s not supposed to be as warm in March and April as it got. Spring flowers withered fast.  Two years in a row, we had no real apple or cherry production on the trees, after their blossoms burst forth early, only to meet with a lack of pollinators, and a killing frost after too-warm weather.  Spinach was over and done with way early, and I couldn’t keep up with the accelerated speed plants needed to go into the ground, complicated by the unpredictability of summer temperatures that could plummet to a freeze later that week.  Too warm too early means those who are prematurely sprouting and blossoming are at the mercy of late frosts, that in our area, often still happen in May.

Rows of radishes and hardy greens being sown

By contrast, I love gentle, cool growing seasons.  The cool season crops are some of my favorites.  Interesting lettuces, complex salads of new greens that are tender and mild, spinach, peas, cabbage, radishes, chives, cilantro, chervil, etc, are all crops that begin to suffer, change, or finish completely as soon as weather turns hot.  The peppers, tomatoes, celery, and others that cannot be chilled are cozily growing indoors, but outdoors I can work in the chilly soil and plant the seeds that don’t mind the cold, and even germinate more happily with a couple frosts.

The other big thing is the maple sap.  We thought maple syrup season was over here, a couple weeks ago, when the weather stopped freezing at night.  But this past couple weeks of cooler temperatures and freezes has prolonged the season, the sap is running heavily right now, and we’ll be able to make that much more syrup than we would have if the weather had stayed warm.

So here’s to the cool weather, and a gentle start to spring.