Misty Morning Hop

So we got some rain today, but holy of holies, we spent most of the day indoors. Greenhouse work, mostly, preparing a lot of seeded trays of various types of lettuce. Red Rosie, Galesse, Sylvestra, Black Seeded Simpson, a few other types I can’t remember. This was our fourth seeding of lettuce. Lettuce grows pretty quickly, and of course doesn’t last forever, and I believe that our shareholders expect to have lettuce pretty much all the time, so we plant lettuce every week. No complaints from me, who also loves lettuce and salads. I also prepared a few trays of beets, a golden variety. I will be curious to try all these different varieties and see what kind of differences I notice.

I was excited to see today that the lettuce transplants I did last week are surviving nicely, even thriving, standing up tall and growing lush, fat leaves. In my observations of other farm folk doing various jobs of transplanting, there is a spectrum of care but a general trust in the plant’s ability to survive a bit of (generally not intentional) mistreatment. These plants, for the most part, want to grow and if they can get their roots in the soil and have a bit of water and light, they can orient themselves nicely. But in any case, I’m glad to see that I wasn’t doing anything grievously wrong.

After lunch, we did some more greenhouse work and then Eric and I launched into a construction project, a fairly basic one, cleaning up the sides of a pallet and attaching a guard rail of sorts around it so that we can put some Rubbermaid bins for compost on it and move the whole thing around on a flatbed without garbage spilling out all over the place.

We also did a fieldwalk in the late morning, with Jamie taking the whole crew around our fields discussing what was happening, concerns, things to remember for next season, and checking on the progress of the plants already in the ground. It’s early enough in the season right now that if, say, the peas were all moldy and rotting and not germinating, we could get another batch planted and still have a nice bunch of peas for our shareholders in some reasonable frame of time. The fieldwalk helps to orient us, know where we stand and what problems might be arising, as well as to keep track of things for adjustment or confirmation in future seasons. I was designated to take notes which I will transcribe onto the computer throughout the year.

Actually, this was a very pleasant, relaxed day, of conversation and decent productivity, and I reacquainted myself with some old skills (very basic skills, really) in carpentry, sawing and screwing and nailing and whatnot. The fields looked verdant and mysterious in the mist, blackbirds, bluebirds and meadowlarks were singing, the red-tailed was hunting, and it almost seemed you could watch the plants grow.