It's May 7. It's been a beautiful week with warm temperatures, sunshine, and just enough rain to make the spring leaves start to show. For a change, Dan's been home helping me around the farm. We have a good bit of the garden planted now, with salad greens, radishes, spring onions, potatoes, peas, beets, beans and a few other things in the ground. Another big project down was tearing down the remnants of our greenhouse. While the new greenhouse we built last year is being prepped for tomatoes and peppers, the older one we've been using for years collapsed under the weight of a heavy snow. While it was a heartbreaker back in early January, now we just want to rid the farm of the eyesore and to use the ground as garden space once again. I have month-old meat chickens out on grass, and picked up a fresh batch of chicks at the post office this afternoon. We're hatching chicks & turkey poults weekly now, with the first guineas coming in days. We had some more babies this week- the last calf of the season along with a few more kittens, and my Silver Fox rabbit babies are growing like bad weeds. Transplanting seedling plants I've started keeps me busy, but it's actually one of my favorite farm tasks. I'm lined up with our meat processor and our coffee supplier to have what we need done by opening day, which falls on May 23 this year. It sounds like life is peachy on the farm, right?
Every year I go through an epic meltdown about this time of year. We're so close to opening the stand for the year, and each year a panic sets in that it will be a failure, that the tables will be bare. It's always tough to run your own business, but it's doubly so when you depend on the weather. It was snowing 10 days ago. It's 87 degrees out right now, but we had lows in the 20's just recently. Spring was late this year, plain and simple. It's a challenge every year to have produce to sell when the last night of frost often falls after we've already opened for the season. It's easy to panic when most of the produce is merely hope in the ground right now.
But there is time yet too, and I need sometimes to breathe and remember that. We'll have meat, and so canned things like jam & mustard, and I'll have vinegars ready by then, too. And plants and baby chicks. Coffee and tea. Blacksmith-made metal creations. Jewelry. I have some cute aprons I made from feed sacks, and some rainy day soon I hope to make up some totes from them as well. By now I know we'll have enough to fill the tables and welcome our farm friends back for another season, which will be the 25th since the Stevenson family has been here at the farm. There is an incredible amount of things to be done in the next 16 days, but they will get done as they always do, with hard work and long days. That is simply spring on a farm, after all. Lots to do, and little time to panic...
Every year I go through an epic meltdown about this time of year. We're so close to opening the stand for the year, and each year a panic sets in that it will be a failure, that the tables will be bare. It's always tough to run your own business, but it's doubly so when you depend on the weather. It was snowing 10 days ago. It's 87 degrees out right now, but we had lows in the 20's just recently. Spring was late this year, plain and simple. It's a challenge every year to have produce to sell when the last night of frost often falls after we've already opened for the season. It's easy to panic when most of the produce is merely hope in the ground right now.
But there is time yet too, and I need sometimes to breathe and remember that. We'll have meat, and so canned things like jam & mustard, and I'll have vinegars ready by then, too. And plants and baby chicks. Coffee and tea. Blacksmith-made metal creations. Jewelry. I have some cute aprons I made from feed sacks, and some rainy day soon I hope to make up some totes from them as well. By now I know we'll have enough to fill the tables and welcome our farm friends back for another season, which will be the 25th since the Stevenson family has been here at the farm. There is an incredible amount of things to be done in the next 16 days, but they will get done as they always do, with hard work and long days. That is simply spring on a farm, after all. Lots to do, and little time to panic...