Even though it's only January, we’re jumping right into the 2026 growing season. Yes, we had a few weeks of rest and time with family around the holidays. Even in the first week of the month though, we got right down to business. First up, crop planning! A multi-day process of figuring out what to grow more of (hello, head lettuce and cabbage), what to grow less of (sorry, dwarf bok choy), and where to grow it on the farm (more sweet peppers in a high tunnel this year!). Elise does the same process with flowers. (I’m already looking forward to all the additional mums we should have this fall!).
Farming in January does look a lot more like an office job, but there’s still work to be done requiring suiting up in many jackets and a pair of snow boots. For one, we cut the plastic off one of our high tunnels. The plastic is due for replacement this year. Rather than replace it right away, we’ll leave the tunnel uncovered for another month to allow for precipitation to reach the soil, hopefully helping to balance moisture and salts therein. The foot+ of snow last week should certainly be beneficial!
Flower seeding is already underway as well. Lisianthus, notoriously slow-growing, start their growing season from teeny tiny seeds in mid-January. For the ranunculus and anemone crops, we plant their corms into larger cell seeding trays. Corms are similar to a bulb in that they’re an underground plant structure for storing nutrients. Looking at them though, they seem wildly different from a bulb! The ranunculus corms look like miniature octopuses.
With the start of seeding, we also needed to get our flooler ready to go! (That’s flower-cooler, for the uninitiated.) This is an annual process of converting one of our cold-storage coolers into a temporary grow room held at about 70 degrees instead of sub-40.
Despite jumping right into the 2026 season, there’s still some nagging things from 2025 to take care of. The sudden drop in temperatures in December took all of us a bit off guard! We normally spend the last month of the year cleaning up the fields in preparation for winter. However, the weather had different plans. The numerous days with below freezing temperatures froze the ground much quicker than usual. It became impossible to pull stakes out of the ground, lift fabrics off bedtops, and even harvest the last bed of carrots we had waiting in the field. Unfortunately, we’ll need to wait for the next stretch of warm(er) days for those tasks. Judging by the inches and inches of snow on the ground and the 10-day weather forecast, it doesn’t seem like that will be any time soon!
- Kiersten
