Nothing beats waking up to blue sky and the promise of a warm day in the middle of winter. I'm pretty sure that weather like this is a purely Northern Californian phenomenon - no place else do we toe the line between cold and warm, rainy and dry, winter and spring. The farm is stunningly pretty on days like yesterday (and today). The sun works to warm the still moist ground so effectively that you can smell the dirt warming and changing. All the grass and cover crop captures the sunlight and glows emerald green. Even the living creatures on the farm (including us) move around with a little extra pep in their step. Weather like this is undoubtedly why Luther Burbank felt like he'd arrived in heaven when he stepped off the train from his native Massachusetts. Within a year of arriving in Santa Rosa, Burbank wrote home saying, "This is the chosen spot of all the earth as far as Nature is concerned." I've been a lot of places and I have to agree with him; we are truly blessed in the nature department.
Great weather in February comes with its own set of responsibilities. Success as a farmer depends enormously on timing. Luther Burbank, who started his horticultural career as a market gardener/farmer, said that to make a living as a farmer you had to be the earliest to harvest. How true! In order to be the earliest to harvest, you have to be ready to take advantage of good weather and get into the ground whenever you can during the winter and early spring. To that end, I have been seeding plants since Winter solstice so that we would have plants ready to go into the ground. Jeff has been mapping the farm and figuring out the first areas to work. Such good preparation leaves us free to do the work when weather permits.
Yesterday was day 1 of farmer boot camp for the year. I tore out a bunch of spent crops in order to clear some areas for new planting. Everything I tore out was fed to the egg laying chickens (man, did they get hopped up on worms and bugs), which meant that I had to push a wheelbarrow extremely full of plants and dirt through 6 inches of mud many, many times. Wheelbarrowing up a hill through mud makes me feel like modern Sisyphus - no matter how hard I push or how much momentum I try to capture, I don't make it to the top any faster. The ground is still pretty wet from the rain, so walking around feels like walking on the sand on a beach that is wet and hard, but starts to give way when stepped on. It's a heck of a workout. In addition to tearing out old stuff, I also planted the first sugar snap peas. Yea! I always love planting the first sugar snaps because they will be the first food of the year that I can eat right off the plant. Don't worry though. We planted enough so that no matter how many I eat, there will be plenty left for the rest of you.
The meat chicks are a week old today and they're doing great. Jeff will start feeding them real food (grass and bits of dirt and other goodies) today, which signals the beginning of their real growth. Only 7 more weeks until they're dinner.
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