It has been a busy week up at the farmette. Friends and family have been visiting for Easter vacation. I feel OK calling it Easter vacation here because we have been doing Easter art projects at school since St. Patrick's Day. If you don't celebrate it; too bad. Very different approach from the city where holidays were never spoken of in school. Honestly though, aside from the Jesus nailed to the cross thing, which we did not do an art project about at school, what's not to like about Easter? There's candy, a giant bunny, coloring eggs, more candy and the rebirth of the outside world after a long cold winter.
I think Easter is my favorite holiday. As a recovering Catholic, it is the one holiday where I think the Bible story is a pretty cool allegory for what happens in spring. Again, not so much about the crucifixion but about the rebirth part of it. Jesus is kind of like a tulip rising from the thawing ground.
Ok, so now that I have pissed off a bunch of Christians comparing God's son to a tulip, let's move on.
Today spring finally arrived. Despite the snow that still covers our north facing slope, it was very warm and sunny and we had to open up the window in the greenhouse to cool it off. The seeds that I planted three months ago are finally starting to look like lettuce. I really cannot believe they made it through the winter. A month ago they were tiny little seedlings sticking out of the frozen earth and now they look like we might be having a salad in the not too distant future. Thank you Eliot Coleman.
In the past we have become overly optimistic about the warming April temperatures and planted things in the garden a wee bit too early, but thanks to the greenhouse, we can hedge our bets. Today we got to work preparing the raised beds for planting tomorrow.
Each bed was spread with two big buckets of a mixture of rabbit, horse and chicken manure. Noelle's contribution will come later in the season when her manure has a chance to age. We then topped each bed with two bags of some sort of soil the husband bought at a greenhouse auction. Since the floor of the greenhouse is wall to wall weed barrier and the soil is from a bag, we are hoping to avoid ever having to pull a weed, unlike the rocky weedy nightmare up the hill. We even captured some of the lady bugs in the house and brought them in to eat the aphids. Take that Mother Nature. It is not a very pretty set up and I can't help but worry that Martha wouldn't approve, but it is functional.
The whole point of the greenhouse is really so the husband can have tomatoes. We have had such miserable luck growing them outdoors here and it is the only produce the husband really wants. He is so confident that this year we will have tomatoes that he bought about a 1000 tomato seeds and we already have five seed starter trays planted. I guess the 50 chickens he is going to butcher and defeather in his homemade chicken plucker will be cooked in tomato sauce. Hint: he posted on Freecycle today in search of a washing machine.
Well, folks, it is time for this farmer to go to bed. Need to be up bright and early to hide some Easter eggs and get to work in the greenhouse. Hopefully I will be dreaming of juicy red tomatoes and not chickens spinning around in a washing machine.
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