Spring feels so close, yet so far away! Believe it or not, the first vegetable crops of the season get transplanted in 3 weeks. The ranunculus and anemone transplants go into the ground, like, now. Rachel seeds tomatoes and hot peppers for the plant sale this week, and the cooler-turned-seedling-incubator has started to fill up with trays and trays of onions, Chinese broccoli, bok choy, eucalyptus, phlox, and more. When I’m working in the greenhouse or high tunnels and the sun is shining, spring seems just around the corner. But, step out of the greenhouse…

And it’s a totally different story! It feels impossible to write an update on February without centering the snow. It’s been covering the ground all month. On one hand, it does provide good insulation for our overwintered crops. The snow actually helps keep the soil warmer than if the ground were bare and, as such, protects the plant roots.

On the other hand, the snow is burying some things that we’d really like access to. Typically in the winter, we pull large silage tarps from the fields into the high tunnels and blanket the bedtops with them. Light deprivation, plus the heat generated under the tarps when the sun is shining, kills off weeds and any remnants of last season’s crops. By March, we pull the tarps off, and the beds are ready for planting.

This year? The tarps have been hidden under feet of snow for weeks. Without the tarps, we’ve resorted to good old-fashioned hand weeding. It’s not as effective and takes much more labor. But sometimes you just work with what you got.

This week’s blizzard brought its own set of challenges - chief among them, digging out the high tunnels. If heavy snow accumulates on top of the tunnels, the plastic can tear. In extreme cases, the tunnel itself could collapse. We’re grateful for our super sturdy, well-built tunnels from CT Greenhouse, so we weren’t too concerned about structural failure. Still, we do not want to be replacing tunnel plastic in this weather, especially so close to planting.

In theory, snow should slide right off the sides of the high tunnels. However, with the amount of accumulation we experienced, massive drifts pile up along the sides. Those drifts prevent further snow from sliding off the roofs and cause more weight to accumulate on top. Armed with shovels, we climbed onto the snowbanks to clear the sides of the tunnels, creating space for the additional snow to slide off the roof as it should.

Despite the stubbornly wintery weather, the days are getting longer, the seedlings are growing, and we are doggedly preparing for spring. Looking forward to sharing flowers and vegetables with you again soon!

-Kiersten

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

So close, yet so far

Jumping right in!

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