…At least that’s what T.S. Elliott said. As for me, it’s a mixed bag. It has been a challenge to deal with the constantly changing weather. We have heard from other farmers, and by driving around and looking out the car window, that a few brave souls have gotten out and tilled up some ground in preparation for planting. I’m not sure that we need to be in such a hurry. April 15th is the first planting date on our schedule, and we did make a couple of passes with the tractor this week to kill some of the weeds that are coming up in our first fields. But each time it snows, I’m glad we haven’t planted anything outside yet.

We are counting totes of storage crops to figure whether we will make it through to when more stuff starts coming in from the field. Carrots will be perfect; onions, we’ve got a couple of weeks left, but we may run short. We just got some new potatoes from Maple Row Farm and will soon have some new beets from Red Fire Farm.   We should probably go get some of those candy-sweet spring-dug parsnips, but the fall parsnips are still abundant and pretty darn sweet in their own right.  The spring-dug ones can wait a little.  Often by now we have some greens coming in from our overwintered stuff in the field, but not this year.  I did crawl under the heavy plastic cover last week and there are some plants alive in there, waiting for some warm weather to grow!  We cleared out one of our greenhouses this week to plant these gorgeous tomatoes.

When will they be ready?  June, maybe?  We will be a little short on our own greens the next week or so until the overwintered field stuff starts coming in, but not to worry!  There are greens available from some of our neighbor farms.  A few aphids had tagged along on the tomato plants, so we released round two of ladybugs.  Ding, ding! Go ladybugs, go!

(by the way, I tried to read that T.S. Elliot poem and had a hard time with it.  He’s a morbid bugger, isn’t he?)