Salad Extravaganza

The week ended with a bonfire - logs longer than I am tall, so hot you could hardly roast a marshmallow, and with sparks that flew to meet the stars.

We celebrated our first direct-seeded bed in the field: lettuce mix, kale, arugula, tatsoi, mizuna, and spinach, all for salad mix (which believe it or not, might be too late already with hot weather coming soon). Kristin's parents came over for the day to watch Olivia so that all three of us could get out and work. It was a gorgeous day, six hands placing the seeds into their mini-trenches. "We need to find a new name for 'salad mix,'" Kristin observed. "Something like 'salad extravaganza' - I had no idea this much work went into something as simple-sounding as 'salad mix.'" Other accomplishments this week were irrigation maps becoming fleshed out; the very beginnings of a business plan; fifteen newly-seeded flats (swiss chard, hot peppers from Farmers Mick and Seth in Pennsylvania, more heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, dill, basil, zinnias, sunflowers, cantaloupe, cucumbers, summer squash, and ageratum, gomphrena, amaranth, calendula, scabiosa, and verbena from Hope); four loaves of Swedish rye bread; a gallon of homemade yogurt; a fresh batch of granola; two pathways mulched with newspaper and leaves.

And Olivia has learned to crawl!

We also celebrated the survival of most of our seedlings after a nasty, unexpected frost on Wednesday night. We knew that freezes will come until mid-March, but most nights are warm enough to leave everything uncovered outside overnight. Wednesday's forecast was a low of 39, so, knowing that this meant a few degrees cooler for us, we covered everything with plastic and tucked the seedlings in for the night. We woke at 7am to a 28-degree morning and frost on every seedling. I didn't know how attached I was to the tomato plants until I saw them turn that translucent frost-bitten color and bow their withered heads. We tried not to beat ourselves up too much for not having had better foresight and caution, but mistakes must be mourned before we learn from them.

The crazy thing about Florida is that we'll get maybe only a dozen nights between January and March that will freeze, but we'll still need some kind of night-time shelter for all the flats (right now we've got more than 30) during that time. Right now that shelter is in Olivia's bedroom-to-be, so we're quickly brainstorming something more sustainable.

Fortunately only four of our 14 flats were killed (tomatoes, zinnias, basil, and some peppers and eggplant), and it is mainly time that we are losing, since we reseeded everything. And, thanks to Kristin, we are not yet depending on this as income, we lucky, privileged farmers.

So we continue with joy and expectation, and gratitude.