Wild Hare Weekly, Spring #1/10

Spring has arrived, and we’re rolling into a new CSA season with some great days in the field behind us.  Over the years, we’ve learned what a difference a single day of relatively dry soils can make for a farm in Springtime, and we were lucky enough to have had TWO consecutive days to begin working in cover crop, prepping beds and planting.  What a gift that was!  Mark, Cathryn, Kelly and I even got to take a new piece of equipment out for a spin after weeks and weeks and weeks of waiting--an implement that will allow us to ride along slowly and transplant from a recumbent seated position as we work from row to row. (Mark’s calling it the chariot; however, we understand that there are clear problems with this title.  Please, don’t get him started.)

On Saturday afternoon, I watched Mark take off into the field on a tractor, hoping to make the most of a dry (enough) window of sky and soil to get a few beds ready for a round of Favas and Green Garlic to go in this week.  After a few passes with various implements, he paused and rubbed his head a few times before he leaned back in the seat, turned over his shoulder, smirked and said, “Well, I guess the farm gets to tell me what to do for the next several months.”  Days later, I’m still not sure if he’s all that mad about it.  This was of course after he’d spent the week sorting out shipments of seeds, collating spreadsheets, shuffling pallets of long-awaited potting soil so that the crew could get tomatoes seeds sown and he could get a greenhouse seeded on schedule (which they did!).  Somewhere in the course of things, he had to fix two separate broken pipes and make emergency repairs at dusk.  That’s almost as sure of a sign of Spring’s imminence as a flourish of crocuses will ever be.