New Leaf Organics

March in the greenhouse, once underway, is definitely one of the 5 top reasons I am still farming. I’ve got my seeding list to get through, my soil warming up and ready to go, the radio playing, and only the potential of the season in front of me. I enter the greenhouse bubble in the morning and have the satisfaction of seeing the tables filling up as the day goes on. The first seeds begin to germinate, and the magic is like nothing else. Simple pleasures that never lose their charm, at least not until April, when May is just around the corner.

Ok, so we’ve had our first couple days of ridiculously beautiful weather here; early for Vermont. All of a sudden everyone is out with their rakes and their shovels finding the things they meant to get to last Fall and never did, and making mental notes of all the grand project ideas that lie ahead for this Summer. As a farmer, I immediately feel behind the eight ball and secretly wish for snow (never to be said outloud) to buy myself a little more time. My list for the season is longer than I would like, and it doesn’t yet include all the things I haven’t remembered about yet. Alas, since it is only April 3, I know I can count on Mother Nature to at least make us bring out the sweaters and hats a few more times. It is a great reminder, however, that I need to get a few things together and quick.

This season is a little more complicated for me to get my head around. Everyday, along with my water, my lunch, and my list, I am bringing my 2 month old daughter, Ada with me. I’d gotten a little out of practice of the multi-tasking necessary to try to take care of an infant and get things done on the farm. My older daughter is now a few months over 3 years old. The memories of balancing the screeching needs of an infant with the screaming needs of vegetable and flower filled fields have all been flooding back. Aaaaaaah. I can already tell that I am going to need to take lots of deep breaths this Summer. So, here we go……….

This week, with one of the greenhouses totally filled and the other slowly getting there, we’ll be starting to “pak up” tons of flower and veggie starts to their new homes. When we start our seeds we usually use these row trays that have 20 (you guessed it) rows where we can easily fit 15-20 seeds per row. This lets us maximize the greenhouse  by only taking up a fraction of the table space these plants will eventually need. Well, we are at that point where everything is now getting to be too big for these trays and we’ve got to bump them up and get them ready to sell. Our farm stand will be open in 3 weeks or so and everything should be in either 4 or 6 paks for people. By the end of this week we should have both greenhouses fairly well filled. We will also start hardening a few things off this week to think about getting them into the fields shortly. For us, this involves moving all of our most hardy and early veggies into our cold house (unheated) to give them a little taste of what it will be like for them in the ground. We like to baby our plants a little bit and have found that giving them a week or so wthout heat really toughens them up for the cold, hard world they are about to find themselves in; our fields in April. So, out go trays of spinach, onions, larkspur, sweet peas, kales,etc….