The 8″ inches of rainwater has receded and we are thankfully no worse for it. We didn’t have any crops in the field yet, which is surely a good thing. The fences stayed up and the animals stayed in. The water did not breach the levee. We feel grateful and lucky that the weather was no worse than what it was.
I am also grateful that we have beds prepared for our spring crops. These beds were prepared back in fall and covered with tarps for since October. It is much too wet to prepare the soil now, but still it is time to start planting! We may yet have some cold nights ahead but spring is right around the corner. The other day Cooper and I saw twenty or thirty Robins in the trees around the pond. Daffodils are blooming. The onion plants are coming in the mail today. The seed potatoes are going to ship in a couple days. In the greenhouse I have kohlrabi, napa cabbage and bok choy that are ready to be planted out with lettuce and cabbage not far behind. Once the soil dries out a little I will be able to start seeding root vegetables. I am all a-whirl with excitement and anxiety.
I have some new tools to try out this year. We are always looking for ways to do things more efficiently. Time is our most scarce and precious resource. I have a lot of experience and expertise. But one of the things we have been working on since I was pregnant with Cooper is making me redundant. We want to implement systems so that anyone can do my job and get uniform results! This year we purchased an Infinite Dibbler. What a great name! Don’t you wish you had something called an Infinite Dibbler? What this tool does is marks the bed for planting so that all the plants will be evenly spaced. We plant onions four inches apart in six rows that are five inches apart and offset. Sound confusing? It is! But now I can just zoom down the bed with my dibbler and all spots where I need to put an onion are marked. Do you know how we did this before? We made each individual hole with a wooden stake. It took almost as long as actually planting the onions! No more measuring. No more estimating. Now the tomatoes will be exactly two feet apart no matter who is planting them. It will both save time and make our plantings more uniform. The Infinite Dibbler we bought from Two Bad Cats.
Another new tool is a plug tray popper. Rather than poking out each individual cell with a pencil or a stick, this apparatus is composed of perfectly placed dowels affixed to a board to simultaneously loosen all 128 cells at once. This should speed up transplanting while eliminating a really boring and repetitive task.
Lest you think I am having all the fun, Randy has some new tools, too. He got a hay spear and pallet forks for the tractor. I know that doesn’t sound as exciting as an Infinite Dibbler and a Plug Popper, but really it just means it is going to make it way easier for us to move big and heavy things around the farm. And that is definitely something I can get excited about.
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