It's the little things

The Bride with her father right before the big show. May 9, 1998.

Ten years ago today I got to marry Maryellen Meaney. Thank you Maryellen for the best ten years of my life!

Growing, growing

Dawn planting out spinach (sorry about the spot of dirt on the lense there). It's nice to have folks back working. Ok I say folks but it's just Dawn so far. We are looking forward to our interns, Sarah, Anna and Andrew coming soon.

Garlic growing strong.

,Henry

I liked Henry's choice of reading material the other night.

In other news, after a week plus of gorgeous, even hot weather, we're back to more seasonal weather. Even a few flurries today but still sunny and nice. The cold got a bunch of our sungolds in the upper hoophouse last night, which was a major bummer, but we will plant more. In happier news, the bumblebees in the first greenhouse seem to be thriving. The kids and I watched them pollinating tomatoes this afternoon.

New workers

Our greenhouse tomatoes are starting to flower, but it is too early for there to be dependable pollinators flying around our farm, so this year we bought some bumblebee hives to live in the greenhouses for a few weeks.

A somewhat bee-phobic Peter carefully opens the hive

If this works it means our first flush of tomatoes will be earlier and bigger. We are excited to see how this works!

Sigh

View of the upper field on Wednesday 4/16

It has been a long winter. We had the most snowfall here since they have been keeping records. And this has pushed our season back by at least a few weeks. You see, in order for us to get on our fields, the snow needs to melt, the ground needs to thaw, the field needs to dry, and then we need a couple of days of tractor work to prep that field for planting. And then we can plant.

Some years we are already planting at this point. But as you can see from the above photo, our upper field is still covered with snow! Now in fairness, it is supposed to be 70 degrees today, and that snow won't last long, but there is no way we will be planting that field until early May.

Lower field on 4/16

The lower field is in better shape. The snow is gone and the ground has started to thaw. But as you can see from the standing water, it still needs to dry out a bit.

One of the things that we have learned is that the weather will always throw us curveballs, but it all evens out in the end. I suspect we will be in for a hot hot summer, which would be nice for the tomatoes. But it doesn't look like we will have much for our first farmers' market on May 17!