Cottonwood Tree Removal and more…
Sometimes I don’t know where to start. So much happening around here. The cottonwood tree has been removed and a retaining wall along the field's south border is nearly finished. The snakes we count on for pest control will be happy with the new crevices the rocks provide. The magnitude of disturbance that comes with heavy equipment is shocking to me. I am used to the human size work of shovels, wheelbarrows and rocks moved by hand. The big gashes in the soil, the torn roots, the giant size boulders all seem bizarrely incongruous with our field. It will take years of cover cropping to undo the compaction caused but it is good to know it is done and the slope is stable. Now the work of replanting can begin…. and it has.
Good friends came to help get the ranunculus and anemone in and under both frost cloth and a caterpillar tunnel. It is scary to plant them out so early after my severe miscalculation with the fall planted biennials. I realize that I over reacted in my disappointment in the fall biennial loss by reseeding for a spring replanting too early. I am too green at this to have my timing down yet! I will need to either bump them up, or plant them out under frost cloth and risk a recurrence of the same catastrophe…but that decision can wait 3 weeks. For the moment it is deciding what to do with the lisianthus plugs that just arrived. They are also much too early, but helped fill the box with the campanula which does need to be in before week 10. I had planned to bump them up in the greenhouse but given the soil temp in the hoop house was 50 degrees today we will plant out at least half of them in there. (The advantage to our fall biennial loss is lots of prepped beds ready to go.)
Part of our loss was due to soils drying out faster in the tunnels than anticipated. We had laid drip line in some but not connected it into a usable system. I will have to decide for next year whether to plan a day per month to lower all the plastic and do a good over head water and then recover, or design a drip system with drain cocks in every line so we can water and then drain before the next freeze. Decision making fatigue is a significant risk factor to farming!
The sweet peas will be pinched tomorrow and the germination room is nearly full of seed flats just beginning to burst into life. Though there is no sign yet of early spring bulbs you can see the hellebores beginning to stir. You can feel the stirring easily now even though you have to look hard to see it. Have no doubt, though there are cold nights still to come, spring has begun her unfurling. The sap will soon rise.