A week ago today, it was snowing a little bit and so cold that we had a fire in the wood stove. We went to a lovely Bat Mitzvah and felt like that was exactly what we should be doing on a wintry Saturday morning. In the afternoon I went to visit Nell and worked on finishing my latest knitting project -- a big purple sweater that may end up being big enough for both Jon and me at the same time. I set it down with about three rows left to go, planning to finish before the warm weather came.
By Tuesday afternoon the cold front moved off and the rain stopped. I decided to go get the lime that I finally found, after many fruitless phone calls. It is not usually my job to find agricultural supplies (Jon and Ellen and my mother are the procuring department) but somehow this had become my challenge. Lime is usually spread by a big dump truck with a spinner on the back -- producing big clouds of grey powder. We need it so infrequently that it has been decades since a lime truck came to this farm. In those intervening decades, oversized houses have grown up on every border, and most of the next door residents scarcely know what is happening just fifty feet from their back fence. To make a long story short, I thought it might be impolitic to fill the air with a thick fog of mystery powder, settling quietly on the decks and windows of the local gentry. And the longer story is that by now there is not an agricultural supply company that will drive all the way to Tysons Corner anymore, for love or money. But the bottom line is that our plants won't grow very well if the soil is too acidic, and we need lime, even if we do live in the deep suburbs.
Anyway, Heinz helped me find the right place with the right stuff, and it was only an hour and a half away. I got one and a half tons of the expensive pelletized version, in bags, so that no one would ever notice when I spread it. No dust clouds. And ever since the sun came out on Wednesday morning, we have been farming up a storm. It feels like so much longer than four days.
Before we can plant, we have to mow the cover crop that has been growing so juicily all winter. Then Carrie spreads compost (with the Oliver 880 tractor and skid loader and a cute little compost spreader, many trips to empty and refill). Then I spread lime and some custom blend dry fertilizer (one of our workers called it multivitamins for the soil) -- again, many trips to empty and refill the small spreader, ten 50 lb. bags at a time. And finally, the first pass with the spader, churning it all up. Generally, we try to get all these activities completed two weeks before the plants go in so the soil can be at its best. This week we have been pushing and pushing.This afternoon Jon and I wrestled biodegradable plastic mulch onto the still lumpy ground -- he is the one who makes all the adjustments to the machine while I sit on the tractor and wait patiently for instructions. He is a perfectionist and I am not, so our roles are right for us. The chickweed is fighting back -- it has had a whole winter to grow some vivacious roots and it is not leaving quietly -- and Jon fidgets with the machine constantly to get the edges of the plastic covered smoothly.
Anyway, on Tuesday morning I was feeling like a fake farmer. Didn't have any lime yet, had only prepared ground for the earliest crops, and it looked like winter. Around the edges of all that focused farming, we went to Arena Stage to see a play about LBJ (very good), I got some sort of food poisoning or something and spent a long night and day living with the aftermath, Jon and I went into DC to see one of my favorite NPR personalities, Krista Tippett, and we picked for the first market weekend of 2016.
You already knew I was going to say this -- the purple sweater has not been touched in a week. But I am going to finish it pretty soon. I am thanking my lucky stars that we are not having the same weather as Denver: they are getting a foot of snow right this minute. Argh. The farmers must be gnashing their teeth.
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