Circle M Farm

After a week of thaw and rain and flooding creeks, we’d just changed our down blankets for cotton comforters. Then this morning we woke up with the back porch thermometer between 0 and 10 degrees. We’d sort of gotten our minds around spring, but there is no doubt the weather will be up and down for quite a while still here in southwest Wisconsin. Nevertheless, much of our early garden is already going strong in the house, thanks to the warmth of the woodstove and the surrogate sun of multiple grow lights.

In fact, we may be in peril of having an alphabet soup of various acronym-ed agencies upon us with all the artificial light shining out of the guest room window that faces the road. Apparently helicopters routinely fly over our community equipped with heat-sensing machines designed to ferret out concentrations of broad-spectrum lights. Ours couldn’t be more obvious, but government agents are certainly welcome to stop here and see what we’ve got growing – maybe they’ll sign up for the CSA! Right now it’s broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and brussels sprouts, all members of the cold-happy brassica family. We’ve also got delphinium and dianthus flowers. And that’s just our first round of winter planting.

Much of our garden starts its life as tiny seeds tucked into plug-divided flats. These get stacked four high, sealed in plastic garbage bags and placed at various distances from our woodstove, depending on the temperature at which the seeds best germinate. The brassicas all wanted to be at 77 degrees, the flowers at 65. As soon as they sprout we move them to shelves in front of our sunniest windows, fitted with additional light from florescent bulb fixtures. The temperature in the windows is cooler, which prevents the plants from growing too fast. Lots of spring-garden plants want to germinate close to 80 degrees but grow on at 50, which mimics the natural cycle in which seeds would fall to the ground in summer, germinate in the heat and grow briefly before winter, and then complete their life cycle in spring.

Once a round of flats (the first planting was 18) is sprouted and on shelves, we have room to start a new round in front of the stove. Most seeds in the first round took four days to germinate, with the exception of the flowers, which are still popping. Friday we’ll do our second planting in flats, including leeks, onions, shallots, fennel, celery and celeriac, which will take longer to sprout. We’ll also start kohlrabi, lettuce, mache and spinach which will be super fast. More flowers are also on the list: viola, rudbeckia, sweet annie and larkspur. If there’s room I’m going to experiment with starting carrots and beets in flats, too, which isn’t much done in America, but I read about all the time in my British gardening books.

Then our third round of planting won’t be for another two weeks, partly because some of seeds in the second planting will take that long to germinate and partly because of the moon. Whenever possible, we plant according to the biodynamic calendar, an ancient farmers-almanac-type tool which recommends specific days each month of the year in which to plant above-ground crops, flowers and roots, and when to cultivate and harvest. These dates are based on phases of the moon. It may sound a bit kooky, but there is good evidence that these methods work, and we figure we may as well take all the help we can get! If the moon is powerful enough to create ocean tides, it must certainly have some influence over the way plants grow.

The plants currently under lights will soon move out to our cold frames and new mini-greenhouse to make room for new sproutlings. And this circular dance will continue through the end of April, when the last starts will be planted in the house – squash, cucumbers and melons. In the meantime, outdoor planting will start as soon as the soil is thawed and dry enough to be workable. Hopefully by the end of March we will have radishes, spinach and lettuce seeded in the gardens. Yum!