These three heralds of winter’s end are here, and have been keeping us busy for the last month!

Seed starting, maple syrup making, and egg collecting all burst out of the depths of winter at about the same time.  Although, we didn’t really have any “depths” of winter around here this year!  The mild weather I complained of in January continued right on through for the most part, and brought about an oddly early maple sap run in the last couple weeks of January, of all things.

Collecting sap, scrounging wood, cutting and stacking wood, nursing the fires, and boiling down and processing the syrup kept us up late nights off and on throughout February.

Sometimes, in critical times of a big sap run, we set our alarms to go off every few hours through the night, and got up to feed the fire under the reducing sap.  Once, I got called out at 3:30 am to a birth, and P just got up along with me and stayed up to keep the sap boiling. 

More than once, we finally completed and canned the finished syrup around midnight, because that’s when it was done.  Leaving for work in the morning, and getting home after 6pm mean catching up on farmwork after dark.

Soon after the days start getting longer and the light comes back, the chickens start laying again after the winter break that most of them take.  But they seem sensitive to cold as well as light, and their egg-laying only really has a burst of speed when the days start to warm above freezing, same as maple sap.  So I always associate maple sap running with the hens laying - bringing in a daily bounty in egg baskets and sap buckets.  Both were unusually early this unusually warm winter.  We’ve started our local egg sale deliveries again, as well as supplying eggs to Selma Cafe.

And, it’s seed-starting time.  I love the process of watching next summer’s plants start off from the tiniest sprouts.  It’s incredible to me that a frail little sprout becomes a giant bunch of celery, or that bushels of tomatoes come out of just the few seeds you can hold in the hollow of a cupped hand.

So far, we’ve got leeks, onions, celery, celeriac, multiple kinds of peppers, eggplant, and various early greens started under lights near the woodstove, or out on the sunporch. 

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.

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.

Gardening, growing, farming is one of those things where you can spend a lot of money, and create more garbage and pollution burden….or not.  A new plastic flat of seed-starting cells can cost $8.  If you get the shiny new plastic cover to keep humidity levels even, and a drip tray below it, it can be $20…and you’ve consumed that many more pieces of plastic.

There’s another way, one that will let you save your money to buy seeds, and that I feel much better about.  Plant in recycled containers.

If you buy food items that come in styrofoam or or plastic trays or boxes, or takeout food, you can use these boxes to start seeds.  If you really don’t want them hanging around your house for months (or you don’t buy food in them), you can ask friends to save them (there will be no problem getting enough, and you’ll have to stop them at some point!), or you can visit a recycling station and quickly pick from a range of choices.  I don’t buy a lot of these things, so I get them from the recycling.  When I’m finished with them or they wear out, they go back to the recycling.

Here are some ideas:

Styrofoam boxes that mushrooms are sold in. Styrofoam is easy to poke holes through for drainage, and the sides of these boxes are just about the right height.

Plastic lidded boxes that strawberries are sold in. They usually have very wide vents in the bottom and sides, and you would think the dirt would fall right out.  What I do is line the bottom with a layer of dryer lint (another reuse!) and then put the dirt in over that.  (Dryer lint can go in the compost - it will be fine going into the garden.)  It holds beautifully, and you’ve got great drainage already built into the container.  Onions, lettuces, and other greens have started really well in these.  Also celery and other plants with very tiny seeds that need to be near the surface of the soil - they can dry out quickly, and benefit from the clear plastic lid.

Styrofoam and plastic single-use cups. Sometimes there are stacks of these in the recycling, probably after someone had a party.  Single-use packaging is hard for us to avoid when that’s the only way things are sold, but single-use disposable cups are more of a choice people make.  I try to mentally thank them for at least recycling, and feel grateful for the stash of little individual plant pots I have for free.  These are perfect for squash, pumpkin, and cucumber seedlings that need a deeper pot.

Those clear plastic boxes that baby greens are sold in. They are getting bigger and bigger every year, it seems.  Big ones can make nearly a terrarium!  These are perfect for something I sow a lot of, just one time, like leeks and onions.

All the things that are started in these containers need to get picked out of the mass planting and either transplanted to the garden, or to individual containers.  This has to happen before they get too big and their roots get very tangled together.  Some people don’t start seeds this way because it is another job when the time comes to separate and transplant the seedlings.  It can be a little tedious and require a gentle touch. But I start many of my plants this way, in mass plantings, because I don’t have enough space under lights for the amount of cell packs it would take to give all the seeds their own space from the start.  This way, you can really make the most use of a sunny windowsill or a couple of fluorescent lights.  Things like onions, celery, and leeks have to get started in February to get good crops, and they are very forgiving when their roots are disturbed to transplant them.  So are lettuces, endives and other greens.  They’ll get started the same way a little later.

Using recycled containers usually requires poking drainage holes in the bottom - very important not to forget!  I set them on a reusable tray to catch drips - an abandoned lid of one of those big tupperware bins, some old enameled pans, etc, do very well.  If the plants need a humidity cover, a light piece of clear plastic (like an opened bag from bread or a bulk food purchase ) works well.  No, the whole setup doesn’t look slick.  It can look a little messy and mismatched.  But it works well for me, and I feel better reusing what’s going into the environment, rather than adding to it.

Three things happen at this time of year, often on the same day.

1) Maple sap starts to flow

2) Hens start to lay

3)The first seeds started indoors are coming up

This week was the week.  It shouldn’t be amazing that it all happens at once, but it still is.  The maple and the hens are most in sync, and this is the third year running that we literally have received the first egg from a new flock of hens on the same day the maple sap started flowing.

Here’s to hoping for a good maple season!  Last year was so short we processed very little.  Already, the past two nights have been too warm for a really good run during the day - it has to freeze at night.  But we’ve gotten enough to start boiling down.  And right on cue, the new hens started leaving the cutest little pullet eggs for us.  The whole flock is ramping up fast - every two days we’re getting about 2-3 more eggs than we got two days before.  Maple custard, anyone?

First seeds are potted and started under the grow lights.  Onions and eggplants are just up, and more get planted every time I have some time to sit down with the soil mix and seed packets.  So exciting.  Even if it gets cold again, snows again (and we hope it will, for the maple’s sake!)… even if there’s actually another month of winter to go… our three signs that spring is coming are in place now.