Spring Equinox
Farm News
This year, the Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere is Monday, March 20, technically, the first day of spring, but we all know Mother Nature often has a different agenda.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, we are fluctuating from windy, sunny, stormy grey days to our usual, cool, heavy rains and flooding spring weather. We seem to have made it through one of the harsher winters with lots of low-lying snow levels and colder temperatures and can now sigh a breath of relief.
We are delighted as crocuses, tulips and hyacinths poke their heads up, trees bud, and the days feel increasingly longer. In the fields, the killdeer have arrived and are in full nesting and mating swing. Many birds have migrated in the last week as their songs are loud and abundant both in the sky as they fly on or stop in the flooded fields for a reprieve. In the Griffin barn, the vacuum seeder’s steady whir and thump punctuate the day and a walk through the greenhouse reveals lettuces, cabbages, chard and broccoli.
“Papa Grande,” our affectionately named pick-up truck, parks itself in the barn and is the designated chariot for the many hundreds of flats that will be seeded up and moved to the greenhouse for their germination journey. The smell of our specialty blend soil mix fills the barn and greenhouses, pleasing us with a sense of a new season ahead.
We will continue in this activity of seeding up for the next month as Mother Nature continues to work out the weather in the fields and makes a full transition into spring. For a very short period of time, we will heat the greenhouses to achieve a consistently warm temperature for ideal growing conditions. The tractors are not quite able to venture into the fields yet without getting stuck, although sometimes I think we secretly love getting stuck in the mud. Over the next three weeks, we will do this dance of trying to get into the fields to prep for transplanting. Our chubby barn cats have ventured from their warm winter mats and cozy eating to a more exercise-filled life of hunting and playing outside in the warming air and soil, and some of us are doing the same!
Enjoy your box this week! – Wendy
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