Greetings!

We’ve seen a few warmer, sunnier days this week, and the plants are responding accordingly. After months of waiting for plants to grow an inch, they’re finally shooting up at a rapid clip. The harvest is still slowly trickling in, but the ranunculus are finally budding up and the poppies are popping. I’m looking forward to endless harvests each morning, and hopefully, after this week, the end of frost warnings.

The recent cool weather has had us closing up our high tunnels during the day in an effort to speed up the bloom time on some of our crops! It’s challenging to predict availability this time of year, and we hate telling florists that we’ll have a crop ready and then coming up short. We send out an availability list to florists on Tuesdays for the following week, which means we’re guessing what will be ready a week before it’s harvested. For the most part, our customers are familiar with the challenges mother nature presents and are quite forgiving when we screw up these predictions, but it presents a hardship for all parties involved, and we really prefer when we’re correct in our estimations.

We’ve been chugging along in the greenhouse, potting up all of the plant sale seedlings as fast as we can. The greenhouse is filling up, and everything looks beautiful! Our plant sale orders will be delivered the week of April 28th, and after that we’ll begin bringing a critical mass of seedlings to the farmers’ market.

*A red salamander we found while planting lisianthus this week! Once of the many species we’re lucky to interact with on the farm*

Planting Away

Despite the cold nights, we’re doing our best to keep up with field work and get crops in the ground. Our soil is still quite wet from all of the rainy weather we’ve had recently, but our no-till system has allowed to prepare beds and plant out seedlings without worrying about damaging the soil structure. When a situation demands it, we’ll still occasionally break out our walk-behind tractor with the rotary tiller attached, but we generally try to refrain from anything that will damage the soil structure and the organisms living within the soil.

At this point, our soil tends to be quite easy to plant into, and we only broadfork to loosen the soil if it seems like it’ll be challenging to get a dibbler in the ground to make a hole for the new seedling, or if the bed needs to be reestablished after a long fallow period. Our low-impact bed prep method is easy on the soil, easy on the body, and relatively speedy.

This week we’re planting lisianthus, raspberries, blueberries, rudbeckia, snapdragons, and eucalyptus! I can’t wait to watch them grow and prosper over the next several months.

*Claire, Carlie, and last week’s gorgeous market bouquets.*

Sunday Market

*It isn’t much, but finally a small haul of butterfly ranunculus!*

We’re back at the Baltimore Farmers’ Market starts this Sunday, April 20th, from 7:00-12:00.

Stop by for your Easter blooms, treat yourself to a delicious market breakfast, and enjoy the morning.

This week we’re planning to bring bouquets, hellebore bunches, flowering branches, narcissus bunches, pussy willow, poppy bunches, and herb seedlings.

Unpredictable Spring

Planting Away

Sunday Market