Monday, May 20, 2013

Too Much Rain

People have been asking us about the garden. They say things like "does the crazy Spring/Winter mean you are behind?" -- "Yes!" We say. At this point all of nature is behind a "normal" Spring and significantly behind last year. So, the frogs have started singing about a month later. The plum trees just blossomed on Friday, and last year I think they were blossoming in early April.

So nature is "behind schedule," but our community's garden is even more behind schedule. Part of it is that the garden has a loamy soil that has a high proportion of silt and clay. This means our soil is slow to dry out compared to sandier soils. The garden also has a north facing slope. Yikes! So we have not even started planting in the garden at the Farmstead. We prepared some soil in the big field by the Homestead for Great River and Class C to plant into last week. It was "chunky" because it was a little wet, but it worked out for getting in their potatoes and some of our onions. A start.

We did some soil prep last week for Class F to plant potatoes today. Then it rained buckets yesterday. Now I don't know if we can make trenches for them to plant into. I am not sure if we can even walk in the field. We will be able to improvise, but this rain has set the clock back.

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