What's happening on the farm?

What's happening on the farm, or to be more specific, inside the hoophouse, is that things are growing. A lot. Many of you will have heard this but essentially once we make it to February, with the length of daylight increasing each day, the conditions for growth become quite favorable. It can be a bit tricky because the overnight lows can still be quite cold. Sometimes this leads to almost desert-like conditions inside, where towards the end of winter things are a bit dry in the hoophouse, warm during clear sunny days, but still quite cold at night. Generally by March we can start a fair amount watering and this March was no different. At this point, it is essentially early summer in the hoophouse (Without ventilating we would have temperatures in the 90 degree Fahrenheit range during the sunny days). With the watering comes growth. Growth of plants that made it through the winter and growth of newly seeded beds. I start seeding any empty spaces in February as well as "flipping" old beds. Flipping being a term I use for pulling the old plants from a bed, fluffing the soil, adding some fresh compost as needed, direct seeding, and watering. (It's kind of like buying an old house, fixing it up and selling it - hence the use of the term - except in this case in the end we get to literally eat the results.) Anyway, all of this is done in stages over the weeks - hopefully in a smart way - in addition to harvesting and bringing to market a greatly increased volume of goodies (those mini harvests of January that I sold out in an hour are definitely a thing of the past). Hopefully those of you at market have been enjoying it and will enjoy some of the new greens slated to make an appearance in things like the salad mix in the coming weeks... I like to vary the make-up as we go through the seasons. So some photos from yesterday of these actions in the hoophouse:


Baby Hong Vit, coming soon to a salad mix near you


Baby spinach


Lettuces - can you spot the red oakleaf, green forest, black seeded simpson (heirloom), and rouge d'hiver (heirloom) types?


Bull's Blood Beets


Before: Tired mache/mizuna and mizuna/mibuna beds ready to be flipped


After: Beds semi-flipped, ready to be fluffed, seeded, and watered