Circle M Farm

This weekend we have 3 inches of snow blanketing the ground.
But last weekend, we had a gorgeous spring bubble of dry, warm weather which allowed me to work in some of the garden beds and get the party started out there.

The ducks were having their own party outside this morning. They are always the first ones up and about – snow or no snow.

Most of my neighbor farmers wouldn’t think about getting in their fields yet with tractors or even rototillers. The ground is still too soggy. But I have the advantage, at least at this time of year, of having a sand farm. This is no exaggeration – local old timers have explained to us that the reason our property has such odd elevations is that it functioned for many years as the local sand quarry. Indeed, when we dug trenches a few years ago to run waterlines back to our gardens, we found that after a few inches of topsoil, the ground was orange sand at least 8 feet down! This means our gardens heat up quickly and drain really nicely in the spring, allowing us to plant earlier than a lot of our fellow growers in this area. So last Sunday I sowed a big bed of spinach and 9 rows of scallions. Both of these crops are cold-loving and will happily bide their time under the snow. Though I haven’t seen any sprouts yet, they’ll probably be there when the snow thaws in the next few days.

Of course, during the rest of the year, all that sand isn’t really an asset. The much-needed rains of summer drain quickly, and even in the most ideal conditions, my top layer of soil dries out awfully fast. That makes it especially difficult to germinate tiny surface-sown seeds directly in the garden, because I have to water them sometimes twice a day to keep them moist. When I sow seeds like carrots and lettuce, which like to be just barely covered, I use a thin layer of coarse vermiculite as a topping, which holds water better than my sand. Even beets, which have quite large seeds, are fussy about moisture and temperature fluctuations when they are germinating. So this year I’m actually experimenting with starting carrots and beets in the house, where I can so easily keep the moisture constant. When they are tiny little hairy roots, I’ll be transplanting them outside. My head lettuces will also be started in the house, though the beds of cut-and-come-again baby lettuce will be directly started outside.

Since we have so little topsoil here, our animals are truly the gardens’ biggest assets. Though most old-fashioned-type homesteaders like us take advantage of animal manure to build and maintain fertility in their gardens, in our situation the animals are actually giving us the dirt. Every year, we add about a foot of composted hay/manure mixture to the beds when we mulch the growing crops. We harvest this garden gold from the barns where our sheep and goats are wintered. Each path between crops is covered with the compost during the growing season, as well. When the growing season is over, the oldest garden is given to the pigs to live in for the following year. When that garden comes back into rotation for us a year later, all the compost has been finely worked into the top layer of the soil, and we have dirt instead of sand. All of our gardens are dramatically different from the plots we first broke when we moved here, and we have the animals to thank for the quality of our vegetables.

Snow doesn’t hurt either. Sometimes called “the poor man’s fertilizer,” snow actually grabs nitrogen from the atmosphere and deposits it on the garden in a form as accessible as a chemical fertilizer. So while I wish I could be in the garden planting this weekend, too, I can rest easy inside by the fire knowing that the snow is a least doing something for my plots out there!

The chickens certainly aren’t afraid of the snow.This magnificent rooster is my favorite of those that hatched out of our hedgerows last spring.