Big morning

Well, the excitement around here this a.m. is the first sale of the 2004 season!!

We sent a little over a case of early lettuce off to Kingdom County Market, which is the food co-op in St. Johnsbury. So if you are reading this in the St. J area, go down there and demand your fresh veggies from Old Shaw Farm!!

The other excitement was more like excitement/panic, than excitement/triumph. I went out to cut the lettuce at about 5 a.m. this morning, in that funny light between the edge of darkness and the break of day. It wasn't really light out and it wasn't really dark. While putting the boxes in the truck, I thought I noticed frost on the truck window, which was strange because at that moment it was raining out. So I thought, "Hmmm . . ." as I reached out to touch the window. On contact, a chill ran up my arm and down my spine at the same time -- that's right -- snow!!

It has been snow/raining all morning, and apparently for parts of last night. The odd thing is that I don't think we had a frost -- it never got below 33 or 34. Even at 5 a.m., which would normally be the coldest part of the night (right before the sun comes up), it wasn't below freezing. So I think our little plants in the field should be OK under their little remay blankets. At least, I hope they are OK. Only a few hundred feet above us (in altitude) the snow was sticking to the ground, so we just dodged a bullet, but not by much. Such is the plant growing roller coaster called spring in Vermont.

Update: I just listened to the noon time weather on VPR, and it turns out we were lucky. They got 4-6 inches of new snow in Walden, VT (about a 1/2 hour north of us), about 2 inches in Greensboro (which is where there is a farm I used to work on), and some place in northern New Hampshire got 8 and 1/2 inches of snow. Unbelieveable!! Sounds like we were on the southen edge of the accumulation, so we did luck out.