Valley Mama

Garden Babies

Little seedlings are emerging everywhere!  It is such an exciting time in the garden.  Melissa and I have been working hard the last two weeks to prep and plant row after row, entrusting seeds to the brown earth...and now, we have green.  

Potatoes, onions, spinach, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, radishes, peas...these are some of the plants whose little leaves have come up from the soil so far.  Speaking of peas, we are amazed at our pea germination rate this year.  We usually have a fairly low germination rate for peas here, even when we use innoculant.  This year we soaked them for two days with the innoculant and then planted them.  So many peas.  We are amazed.  We should have lots of snow, sugar snap and shelling peas to enjoy this year.

We're not quite done planting, though we're getting close.  We'll, I suppose we're never completely done...there is succession planting of  certain crops that will happen all summer...but we are nearing the end of the big, two-week planting push.  We just finished planting carrots, beets, chard, kale and many other varieties of green things.  Now we're on squash, cucumbers, beans, basil, herbs and flowers.  I'm sure I'm leaving a few things out.  

And the two cutest garden babies are growing like weeds as well.  Eating dirt, pulling out drip lines, splashing in water, exploring bugs and tools...they are doing their own important work.  

Not a bad way for them to spend these first summers of their lives...here's to many more.  

Let the Planting Begin

What a week it has been!  Melissa, myself and the farm kids have been in the field every day laying drip lines, prepping rows, building pea fences and (finally) planting!  It always feels so nice to get the first crops in the ground.  

After Alan tilled, we spent most of a day just setting up the irrigation.  Since the shape of the garden is changing a bit this year, the layout of our drip lines has to change as well.  As we went about our work, cutting main lines to add new pieces, solving the puzzle of how to get water to all the spaces to be planted, connecting lines and rolling out new drip tape, I laughed to myself at how easy it all seemed now.  We have this irrigation thing down.  It may seem like I'm bragging, but when we first began this garden-to-market adventure I knew nothing about this mysterious process of irrigation. 

There were so many different sizes of everything, from the poly tubing to the drip tape (and what kind of drip tape was the best?), not to mention the various connectors, emitters, valves and tools to make it all work.  Luette was our irrigation specialist that first year.  (You can read more about how we got started here.)  After a few years of experience, I actually now enjoy this part of spring.

Getting-water-to-plants problems solved, we moved on to prepping rows.  This  means using our hoes to form hills, making a trench down the hill, and adding a little compost.  A lot of work, yes, but definitely worth it.

Oh how good it feels to plant those first rows!  We've planted the greenhouse, salad boxes and various starts, but there is nothing like digging your hands into a freshly prepared row in the field, carefully tucking in little potatoes and onion plants.  

While the recently cut potatoes were curing, onions went in the ground first.  We planted onion plants and sets.  Mason enjoyed helping plant the onion plants.  We'll have plenty of onions this year...red, yellow, white, scallions and even some cute little minature onions.

Utah has his milk while Melissa keeps planting onions.

Now he's ready to help plant onions!

The next thing in the ground was the potatoes,  and what a lot of potatoes we planted.  I believe the phrase of the day (thanks to my superhero obsessed farm boy) was, "Holy potatoes, Batman!"  Yukon golds, reds, fingerlings, and some purples for fun...we love potatoes.  We actually just finished eating last year's potatoes from the root cellar, so I'm excited for those tasty little new potatoes will get soon. 

Yesterday and today we worked on the pea rows. Sugar snap peas, snow peas and shelling peas...I love peas.  Of course planting peas means building pea fences, and we got that finished today as well.

As we work, we sit in a vast expanse of brown.  It's a good brown...a hopeful brown.  We plant, we talk, we watch the farm kids, and we marvel at the way this garden will look in a month.  We honor the brown, and are so excited to welcome the green.