Thanks to Old Man Winter hanging on to every day he could, everyone around here has been working double time to get the farm ready for planting. The cold, the rain, the cold again, then the floods from the melted snow, then the wind…finally, we can do something outside. And, we’re already 3 weeks behind.
Apple trees are pruned, the flower and vegetable gardens are now prepared, and we’ve begun to plant what we can. Another 1200 Christmas trees just arrived, and they have to be planted right away, so that means finding a spot for them and preparing the soil.
The huge snow before Christmas crushed our high tunnel and everything in it, so we’re now erecting new one. It’s crucial to get it up again, because of course, it holds Ridgefield Farm’s Halloween International House of Panic. We were making a lot of progress until we discovered that we were missing parts, and that much of what we got was wrong. So we shifted gears again and went back to fertilizing and weeding.
Manuel has a couple of newcomers working with him in the fields this year, George and Ovi, and we’re delighted to have them on board.
The pick your own strawberries look to be fantastic this year. I can’t imagine how they survived the winter with several tons of snow piled on them for 3 months.