01/17/2025
Spinach out, spring mix in. Snow on the ground all around.
We’ve had more snow and cold here this winter than any of the last six that we’ve been farming and it looks like we might get a little more on Sunday! Here at Second Mountain, like most people we’ve talked to, the snow has brought with it all the feels. We’ve been giddy for the play, awestruck by the beauty and grumpy about this unusually long shift in reality.
One thing that’s been consistent is that we keep on farming! In the last couple of days, Nate flipped six beds in Screech (one of our heated tunnels - they’re all named after local birds) from spinach and other spent crops to early spring tomato beds. Can you believe it? It feels even less believable with the snow cover, but we will be planting the edges of our tomato beds with other quicker growing crops over the next couple of weeks. Then when the tomatoes go in the tunnel in March - and we crank up the heat to make them happy - we’ll have lettuce, radishes, carrots, cilantro, bok choy, scallions and lots of other goodies coming out of those beds and onto your tables while those young tomatoes are maturing into giant fruit producers!
This approach allows us to better utilize the heat we’re pumping into those tomatoes early in the year at a time when they’re racing toward maturity, but unable yet to fruit. And several bonuses arise! You get earlier greens and roots at a time when, as we know from those first April markets, you’re starving for them! The tomatoes mature by May, giving us all some seriously early and delicious heirloom slicers! And, we here at the farm have steady work when there’s six inches of snow and ice on the ground and more coming. Which, in turn, means we have less work in May and April when things are mostly bananas around here.
Go sledding y’all. Stand outside and enjoy the beauty before it’s gone. And take a breath when that ol’ grump comes along. Tomatoes will be here before you know it!
