Unofficially, Spring has Sprung

We began seeding in the greenhouse last week, spending two full days, 49 man hours, delicately dropping about 100,000 seeds into 50,000 cells in 225 trays. I believe it's our biggest seeding week of the season. We'll be seeding weekly through September and every day those seeds and seedlings in the greenhouse and hoop house (where they harden off before going outside) will require adequate water and temperature regulation. Crops and varieties spend anywhere from 3 to 12 weeks in the greenhouse and hoop house before being planted outside.

And it begins! Farmers Gabby and Connor embark on seeding 25,000 onions, 2/cell, into 288-celled trays.

Oddly enough, outdoor field preparation actually commenced prematurely in February, for the first time in 15 seasons.

Each season there's a very brief window of opportunity to get into the fields with the tractor to open the soil with the chisel plow and follow with a couple of passes of raised-bed making. This year that window opened a few weeks ago in February and may now stay shut until later in March. We're in good shape. I was able to prep beds for basically all of the early April planting space needed. The beds aren't finalized, but they're formed well enough that when there is a large enough gap in precipitation events they will dry out fairly quickly and allow us to get the next round of work accomplished.

Farmers Gabby and Adeline loosening the soil in one of the caterpillar tunnels.

Under cover, we're busy preparing four tunnels for early spring crops of spinach, chard, kale, arugula, bok choy, radishes, turnips, and lettuce mix.

This is all done manually. Actually, that's not quite true this year. We did have Farmer Dana's sheep go in there and mow down any crop residue or weed growth, which did save us time and resources mowing. We'll be forking, hoeing, and raking and removing any crop competition over the next few weeks before we plant in late March.