In January, when the last of our low tunnels collapsed under snow, when the turnips and carrots froze hard in the ground and the plastic that had sheltered them shredded in the icy wind, we finally accepted that winter had won and turned our attention from eking the last vegetables out of last year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s plantings to thinking about the summer to come. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to imagine that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll ever arrive. In spots where the wind has scoured away the snow, the grass is matted and bristly like an old brush, the ground hard as cement. The creek in town is a frozen ribbon, static except where the water has cut gashes in the ice, and even there the water looks thick and slow.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been filling seed trays and setting them in warm spots in the kitchen and barn. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re seeding them with plants that take a long time to wake up: celery & leeks, for instance, which would hibernate until August if they were allowed to do so. Next we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll put in tomatoes and peppers, lettuces and kale. In a month or so, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be setting up a new greenhouse and moving our young seedlings in there like settlers staking their claim against winter, making way for spring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In January, when the last of our low tunnels collapsed under snow, when the turnips and carrots froze hard in the ground and the plastic that had sheltered them shredded in the icy wind, we finally accepted that winter had won and turned our attention from eking the last vegetables out of last year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s plantings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-farm"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.pigandegg.com\/hayloft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.pigandegg.com\/hayloft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.pigandegg.com\/hayloft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.pigandegg.com\/hayloft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.pigandegg.com\/hayloft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.pigandegg.com\/hayloft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.pigandegg.com\/hayloft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.pigandegg.com\/hayloft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.pigandegg.com\/hayloft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}