Much as I’d like to see some sunshine, this gentle rain is so beautiful.  Pretty enough to just snap some quick photos in the rain…..

Perhaps after a couple of greens-toastingly hot springs, this can be the year for cabbage, lettuce, peas, and and the cooler crops.  Here are some shallots that have naturally become interplanted with volunteer chervil which seems to be working out well for them.  I can’t get enough of the spring colors…..

Peas and lettuce are thriving.  The heirloom deer’s tongue lettuce is one of my favorites - reliable, crisp, delicious, early, and gorgeous, with its funny tendency to spiral…….

The old Welsummer Rooster and a few of his hens go for a stroll in the light misty rain….

Lilacs bend to the ground under the weight of their water-laden blossoms…. …happy beautiful Spring!

It’s a great irony of being a blogging farmer, that when there is the most going on to write about, there is simply no time to write.  The days are growing long enough that I’m frequently working outside until 9pm.  Work is intense enough that it’s hard to carry a camera to document it.  It is such a race to get the little plants and seeds into the ground at good times - at the right time for their planting, before a good rain, before the days get too long…so much to think about and plan for.

And it changes so quickly; in the other job as a midwife, I went to three births last week and at the end of the busy time spent away, I realized the trees had leaves!  When did that happen?  So much has changed in three weeks…

Kitchen garden less than a month ago...

Kitchen garden yesterday.

Yesterday was a perfect planting day.  Cool but comfortable temperature, cloudy threatening to rain but holding off.  It was fabulous, and we really worked.  44 celeriac, 48 celery, 200 leeks, 80-ish spinach, 40 radicchio, onions I didn’t count, 2 kinds of potatoes, and long rows of radish, beet, chard, arugula, and other greens - all joined the hundreds already in the ground.  Weeded everything, moved tomatoes and peppers through hardening off rotations, mowed, rototilled, mulched, helped family with other planting projects.  It’s odd to mention numbers, as I know this is nothing compared to big farms and seriously rocking CSAs.   It’s new to me to even count - I don’t usually, but yesterday I was getting curious about the numbers.  We have just the two of us working this farm, around two other jobs, and we’ll take to market whatever we end up having.

We are harvesting enormous amounts of gorgeous salad greens. Two meals out of the day are usually a European-bistro-style greens mix with egg and good dressing to top it.  After a long winter, there is nothing so satisfying as a strong salad mix of dandelion, spinach, baby kale, and young lettuce leaves, with a green-garlic and anchovy vinaigrette and an egg on top.  We celebrated the first few spears of asparagus on this salad, sprinkled with chives!

A lot of things are halfway done.  We could always do more, and we did more than some.  I’m on break to post this, and here’s my halfway photo to prove it.

If you click on the photo you can see a bit more detail, but among the projects visible are (far left) the garage (which is halfway cleaned up for the spring), and the newest chicks in their fenced coop (30 of them, about half the total chicks we should have housed there by the end of May), the kitchen garden (distant background fenced in, which is about halfway planted), the “big field” with a rowcover tent (foreground, with tiller marking the halfway mark of the tilling), our two biggest apple trees in full bloom hiding our neighbor’s house, and behind the big field on the right are a bunch of our spindly new apple trees, just starting to bloom.

I just finished (no halfway job) some coding that needed it.  So I’m going to take a break and head out to push the big field tilling job to a little beyond halfway.  I expect M will have the field halfway planted within another half day.  And when I get the big field done, I should be halfway through the tilling I intend to do.  And the green green grass here will be half again past where it should be when I should mow it.  I can’t wait to get the new hoop house halfway finished.  Now that’ll be progress.