During March, there have been nearly as many days with snow or rain as without – perhaps 6 sunny days all month.
For those interested in such things, a ski resort a couple of hours from here (Brighton) has had 750″ of snowfall since October.
Here at the mini-farm, rain has melted most of the snow at least 5 times this month, only for another snowstorm to roll in and blanket the ground again.
According to official records, the last time it hit 50°F here was on November 16, 2022, when the high was 53°. The highest temperatures in the subsequent months have been:
December, 47
January, 41
February, 36
March, 47
Perhaps 95% of the time since late November, the temperature has stayed below freezing. So inside the house (except the one heated room), the temperature has been very much like a refrigerator, between 33-45°
Maybe this has been a good thing, because so far, I’ve had only a few hours available to devote to extraction of pepper and eggplant seeds from the 2022 harvest. More precisely, a half-day on March 26th when I ignored seed orders. There is a lot of mush, but the seeds seem to be fine.
Weed seeds are germinating like crazy under the snow – a few warm days and the ground will be a carpet of green. Deer have been chewing garlic and onion tops to the nub all winter. Some day I’ll get a heavy-duty electric fence installed and…
This morning (March 31st) I woke up at 3:30, anxious to get caught up with seed requests after months of trying my best to do so. Indeed, at 7:01 a.m. I was all caught up – literally for the first time in 94 days! Over 3 months of doing virtually nothing with my life except sharing seeds. Learning to get more efficient with the process, in part by hiring several people to help with the actual seed packaging. I got behind by as much as 16 days, and just could not physically handle it (sleep deprivation – you don’t want to know…)
I made a quick symbolic, celebratory run to the post office this morning – something I never do – thinking, “Whew, what a relief, how good this feels after 3 months of intense focus on one task; now I can finally start focusing on seed extraction and planting seeds for my own garden and for seedling customers”.
You guessed it, by 7:19 a.m., more seed orders started coming in, enough that I many not be able to get them all filled by tomorrow. No resentment – I’m doing all of this to be able to share seeds, and seedlings, and fresh produce with other people. I can easily imagine other, less noble outlets for my OCD and tendencies for addictive behavior. It’s just that it’s very challenging to manage all resources, especially time.
I was going to title this block post, “TRIAGE”, but that just carries too much negative baggage. The list of very important projects simmering on the back burners is very, very long. But I’m doing my best to keep up with the most critical ones.
I suppose, for the fun of it, I could post a couple of photos of tomatoes from 2022 (several thousand photos yet to be named…) – full list of tomato seeds available is published at: DT Tomato Seeds
Delectation of Tomatoes, etc. 