It’s been a couple of weeks since the last post, and there is a lot to report!   First of all, as I write this I am sitting at the desk in the new office.  The walls have been painted, the floor sealed, trim installed around the windows, and it is ready to go.

Secondly, the greenhouse transition was successful.  Matt put on his electrician hat for quite some time and got the heater and fans in the second greenhouse installed and working.  Yesterday, we made the big switch and moved all the seedlings and microgreens out of their normal house and left the heat off and doors open.  This will be the golden opportunity to freeze out any pests that might be hanging around waiting to multiply on the spring seedlings.  It will also give us a chance to get it cleaned up and well organized for the upcoming season.   Having two heated greenhouses now is not only awesome in that it lets us freeze out one with no interruptions in growing, but it also opens the door to more options of early and late crops.

Speaking of seedlings and microgreens, both are still coming along great.  We’ve downshifted slightly in microgreens to make more room for all the new stuff.  At this point we have thousands and thousands of onions seeded, most of which have germinated and are growing nicely.  We’ve also seeded shallots, leeks, parsley, celeriac, rosemary, and already potted up the chives.  It’s funny how I see these little seedlings almost everyday yet only notice the difference in their size when it seems significant to me.  I’ll come in on Monday for example, and think wow these germinated over the weekend, or they got a lot bigger since last week.   And I wonder why it is that I can’t detect any changes happening right in front of me, why I never actually see a little sprout pop up through the soil and stretch
out nice and tall.   Am I just not observant enough to see these changes taking place or as a human am I actually
unable to? I wonder if I actually did sit and watch a little seed as it sprouts if I would actually see it happening or only be able to note it’s appearance at frequent intervals?  Anyways…

The 2012 crew is continuing to take shape and it looks like we’ll have a lot of great people around again.   On Friday the first member of the new crew arrived.  He is from Billings, and is estimated to be about 60 years old, with plenty of farm experience.  He will specialize in speedy cultivation at the new field, and will be a lot of fun to work with.  He goes by the name “Little A”,  I’ve posted his photo below…

Apparently the blog has gotten away from me the past couple of weeks.  I would like to say that things have just been so busy that I haven’t had the time, but that is not really the case.  Work-wise things haven’t been too much different, but somehow the days and weeks are just flying by.   I find it hard to believe that we are more than half way through February already, and at the same time very excited that spring planting days are on their way.

In the meantime, things sound like they are on track at the moment.  In the greenhouse we’ve continued seeding onions.  A lot of onions.  We’ve also seeded parsley and rosemary and with the microgreen production continuing at the same time we have momentarily reached the capacity for seedling space.  The larger greenhouse next door (where the cucumbers were last summer) is getting outfitted to become a heated greenhouse,
which will be very cool.  It will open up many options for season extension with both early and late crops, as well as give us the opportunity to give the current seedling greenhouse a rest.   Meaning, we will soon be able to re-locate all the seedlings temporarily to the larger greenhouse, and leave the current one open to freeze out, killing off any hibernating pests that might be waiting for the spring.  This is usually part of the winter plan,  but last year it was skipped and we saw the difference in the aphid presence.

Indoors, things are underway as well.   While I have been joking that the kitchen table has doubled as the office for writing grants and applications for organic certification, Matt and Jacy have both been getting the office ready downstairs.  What had once looked more like a storage room has been cleared out, drywalled, painted, stained, and is finally fulfilling it’s destiny as an office space.  Otherwise, it seems like things are mostly chugging along as normal.  Harvesting spinach and microgreens is still a normal part of the week, more manure was spread on the fields, and other projects are likely in the works as well.   The grant application has been turned in, and fingers are crossed, so keep an ear out for an update about that soon.