Slightly muddy planting

While most farms are waiting for the soil to dry out from the constant rains to get their tractors in the field to transplant, we have been able to transplant by hand.

It has been a little bit muddy but last Thursday and Tuesday the soil was dry enough for us to transplant.

Our greenhouse was full of veggies waiting to be planted so we took advantage of the windows we had to transplant them.

If we missed these opportunities to transplant we may have had to wait another week or more with a good amount of rain on the forecast.

We transplanted lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, broccolini, cabbage, chard, kale and kale. The baby plants will enjoy growing in the soil much more than the cell trays they were in.

While we have been able to do some transplanting we have not been able to direct seed any veggies in the soil. It is a little too muddy for that to happen so we have had to push back those seeding dates.

It seems like we will get another decent chunk of rain in the next week so we will have to wait until the following week.

Before we direct seed those veggies or transplant much more we will need the soil to dry down enough we can use the tractor to mow down the cover crops and prep the fields. When we had the dry weather at the end of January and in early February we got a large area prepared for planting but we knew it would not be enough as we thought we could do more at the start of March.

We have lots of plants in the ground from last fall and the past month that are growing but they are growing very slowly.

All the farms in the area are seeing slower growth on everything whether it be veggies or flowers. One farm we know is harvesting some veggies right now that they had initially planned to be harvesting at the end of December.

We definitely have lots of veggies we had planned to be harvesting earlier but still are waiting for them to grow to the right size.

Those veggies include cauliflower and fennel which are showing signs of growth but only slowly.

Likely we will end up with a lot of veggies ready to harvest at the same time once the days start to warm up and we are truly into spring.

It will be an exciting time with so much to harvest, plant and weed when that happens!