What a great day! Monday was the first day of team 4 on the farm. Jeremy and Jessi finished their city jobs Saturday, and arrived Sunday in time to celebrate Mother’s Day with my Mum and Dad, and my brother and his wife. After a lovely Sunday feasting and visiting, the four of us got down to the first of what will be many “To-Do” lists. In a spirit of cooperative teamwork, we set out to accomplish as much as we could. We seeded 700 lettuce soil blocks, dug up the dahlia bed where we made the unhappy discovery that 86 of our dahlias did not make it through the winter, potted up the dahlias we found, along with some new ones ordered from Vesey’s, dug up all the strawberry plants and re-planted them into new wooden planter boxes mounted on the fence, discovered that we had twice the berries than box space so Stephen and Jeremy quickly built a couple more boxes, cleaned out and whitewashed the brooder shack for the 125 baby chicks arriving on Wednesday, collected a week’s worth of coffee grounds from a coffee shop in town to add to our compost, plus more stuff that I’ve already forgotten – crazy productive day!
It was sunny, even warm at times and the fields and hedges around us teamed with life. The bird song is positively joyful this time of the year – the owls are hoot hooting all through the night and well past dawn these days. There are frogs everywhere, even just outside the front door of the house, and everywhere you look a tree is leafing out or blossoming, the skunk cabbage (now re-named swamp lantern) is blooming by the pond, trilliums and violets dot the hillside and my favorite, the dogwoods are blooming. It’s cooler than normal and everything is coming on a bit later, but happily the plant lifecycle is endlessly repeating itself.
Asparagus is like corn - it tastes better when you eat it fresh, before the sugars turn to starch.
We ended the day with a fabulous salmon bbq – our neighbor brought by a white spring salmon that he caught that day which tasted surprisingly similar to trout. We picked asparagus from the lower field and salad greens from the greenhouse to round off the meal. It doesn’t get much fresher than that.