Spring....it is like... a woman

Did you know farmers can go to New York City too.  That's Washington Square Park there.  My brother actually lives in that low rise brick building on the right there, top flor; so if any one ever needs a place to stay in New York, he's super handy to the Village and SoHo.

How many of you know, that i used to live in New York.  That's a fact.  I was a bike messenger... way back before email or cell phones... when the getting was good.  To this day I know the city like the back of my hand.  But it's one thing to know the geography of a place... can't really say I know it anymore...

This is my kids' "spring break" with Papa in Maine.  Snow suits and big hats were in order for excursions into the woods.  Gideon's earflaps always end up in front of his face making him look like an elephant.  Anna never gets tired of eating snow...any way she can get it.

It is spring as far as the chickens are concerned!  Over the winter, it got so bad, even with lights on them, that I was buying eggs!  Now we are up to 22 dozen a week, after us and the crew eat our share!

All my eggs go to Central Provisions.  They have found a great home there.  I asked him what dishes they go in so I could BLOGGG about it, and he replied:

They go on all the brunch dishes, 

-scrapple and eggs

-bacon egg and cheese breakfast burger

-skillet corn bread 

-also goes on our bread and butter dish with the farm egg sabayon!

I need Hay

Chris likes the eggs so much, that he convinced me against my better judgment, to stay in the egg game.  If we were going to do that, then we were gonna need new younger replacement hens.... and so we did it.  100 new girls arrived a week ago.  I set up the old no longer used walk in cooler, as a walk in heater, in which they are brooding away happily, through all this miserable cold.  The yellow ones there, are buff orpingtons.  The black ones, are barred rocks.  They should start laying just about in time for Halloween.  Quite an investment it is to raise layers...

Here is Samiel washing the very last white carrots from the cellar.  We cleared the cellar out, and found a few treats.  I was commenting to some one, about how I need to organize the cellar better in the future... but at the same moment it occurred to me:  why?  If I knew I had more purple top turnips back when I "ran out", then I would have run out by now.  Instead, it's like some of these veggies appeared back out from behind the curtain for an unexpected encore!  Even better!

Here is Fausto and Emily grading the orange carrots we salvaged.  Look at how disgusting the one in Emily's left hand is.... no wonder I thought we had no more good ones!  But after a few washings and hard gradings, we ended up with a few hundred good carrots still, here in mid April.

This is where the magic happens.  All the seeding is done here on this table.  In this picture you see:  the French press keeping me in that dank coffee..... the lap top streaming On Point with Tom Ashbrook.... the boombox amplifying the lap top over the furnace that is just out of the photo to the right.... you see my cordless phone, which allows me to talk on the phone all the way out to my greenhouse! (remarkable technology).... if you look at the end of that card board box, you will read the actual contents of that box... which you see me laying out in trays of soil to the left.  I filled about 30 of these trays with ginger root, fresh from Hawai'i, covered them over with soil, and put them in a heated germination chamber, to trick them into thinking they're back in Hawai'i.  When they sprout, they will go out on tables, and later be planted out in the ground, in the new greenhouse.

And this is where chard comes from!  When a farmer and the soil , love each other very much, they take a seed... and....

This is the "big picture".  Already over half filled with seedlings. This picture is already outdated, because here you can barely even see that there is anything in all those trays.  today, just a few days later, it is a sea of green.

In that scene, is chard, kale, collard, cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi, lettuce, escarole, radicchio,dandelion, bok choi, han tsai tai, chryasanthamum greens, sorrel, shiso, fennel, lemon balm, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, onions, leeks, scallions....and the list goes on!!

This is what little baby onions look like.  They come out the dirt folded like that, then pop over, and stand up.  Before we know it, they ll be the first thing to get kicked out of the heated greenhouse, and go out to a cold frame, to make room for everybody else that 's gotta get some space in the greenhouse.

This is today, April 9th.  This is the sad joke that spring 2015 is....  I celebrated the absurdity with some ground spray paint in the drive way.