The winter months have been active at the farm, and with the holidays in the rear view mirror we are now gearing up for the 2022 spring. Any doubts would be dispelled if you were walk into U1, our stock plant/propagation house that we keep going all year round. There are seedlings and trays of cuttings under supplemental lighting and bottom heat. Stock plants give the place a tropical feel and it is great to be in a heated room with so much active chlorophyll. My neighbor refers to U1 as “Pooh’s Nuclear Greenhouse” because of the glow the additional winter lighting gives off to the winter sky. Light pollution? Yes, but a necessary evil as we try to extend day length and day light in the early winter months. This enables us to start vegetables and ornamentals and have them ready for gardeners in spring as well as provides us transplants for our fields. The day will come in April when the lights go off for the year until the following November when we start trying to force vegetative growth for propagation on our seeds and stock plants. Though I am no longer able to play hockey or ski very effectively, I have enjoyed the shorter days of winter this year. . I usually knock off at dark, so where most people abhor the shortening days in fall, I rather like it. When we get going in the spring, 5 pm means another 2 hours of working daylight before dinner, where as at the first of the year, I have no qualms about picking up and heading in to cook dinner at 5 pm. Anne and Sarah have been busily ordering seeds and cuttings and inventorying the greenhouse items. Along with this comes the task of chasing ordered product that gets lost, back ordered or shipped incorrectly. Then there is the dreaded printed tag order to do and when Anne mentions the task, you are apt to find greenhouse personnel hiding behind doors and couches. Ray and Mike just recently terminated wholesaling the 2021 fall root crops, and the pack barn has been re organized into a seed house and flat filling mecca complete with pallets of thawing soil mix in bags and mountains of plastic pots and flats to be filled. This activity will begin in earnest that last week of February and first week of March, at which point we will find out whom is returning to work from last years crew and the tedium of hiring for the new year begins in earnest. Jenny will have most of the CSA drop points points sorted out a well as the related advertising ready for the year. We begin to have an idea whether we will make the numbers projected sales numbers with the CSA or have to institute a cut off on membership. By the first of March I will have herbs and perennials germinated on the greenhouse bench with tons of trays of rooted cuttings. Ray will be furiously grafting greenhouse tomatoes and be totally versed on the latest diatribes on sports talk radio from being sequestered in a small room grafting tomatoes all day. Anne and Sarah will be getting outsourced cuttings daily, and that point we start transplanting with the greenhouse crew in earnest for the retail season in May. One of the things making our jobs more difficult this year is shortages of products. The picture appear in the catalog, you order them and it immediately becomes back ordered or unavailable. This precipitates a lot of paperwork and phone calls on Anne and Sarah’s part, and usually this happens on a normal year. This year it has already begun and it is is the worst we have ever seen. Potting mix is more expensive and in short supply for the first time that I can ever recollect. Plastic (greenhouse coverings, pots and flats) all took a big jump in price (and not even made from recycled plastic!). We are hearing of the unavailability and shortages of fertilizers for the fields. To add to our problems one of our plant vendors this year started requiring that in order to buy rooted cuttings from them in 2022, we would have to additionally purchase their preordained container to plant into from them as well. It happens that the container has their name and advertising info plastered all over it, not ours. So essentially we would be purchasing a rooted cutting in February from them, growing it 2 to three months, and then be bound to sell it with their advertising all over it, having purchased the container at an inflated price. Suffice to say, we wont be signing any such agreement nor selling any of their plant material. But things like this are just one of the myriad of potholes in the road we have to negotiate to get to the fun part of actually growing things. We also use this “in between time” to do some repairs. With 30 greenhouse structures about, there is always the necessary upgrades that must be done. Like replacing rotting doors that have fallen off their frames or hinges. This job usually falls to Mike, whom likes to set up the shop into a little production area where he can “mass produce” the repairs like doors and precut framing materials. Additionally we were faced with replacing the floor underneath the farm stand cooler , which was getting spongy and rotten. The cooler essentially is being removed, necessary floor repairs made and we will place the new cooler in a freestanding frame adjacent and accessible to the kitchen . It will be a free standing unit on the exterior of the building where condensate cannot seep into the floor. Repairs of this nature and magnitude we leave to Mike because he can fit them in amongst the other things he needs to do, and not least of all as he is probably the most skilled carpenter and electrician of the bunch of us (which is a pretty low bar). He enjoys working by himself, and we are happy to let him so we can do other things. In December we purchased a 30 acre field in Windsor. It is actually quite close to Ray and Jenny’s farm in Cornish. It’s a well drained alluvial soil and we are working with the town of Windsor to get town water to the property for irrigation. It will need supplemental irrigation from time to time in order to grow fruits and vegetables. We got a cover crop in last August ,and we thought we would be cover cropping for two years, but Ray feels that we should plant potatoes up there and rest a couple of the fields along the river. As I have always said, the Edgewater Farm 5 Year Plan has a life expectancy of about 6 months.
On a reflective note, we lost our old pal Pep, whom passed away recently at 102 years of age. Pep was short for Pepere, a French Canadian term for Grandfather. Pep was born Eugene Jean Chabot. He quit working here after getting his 25 year “Gold Watch” at 91. He gave up his license because he felt he didn’t see well enough to drive. He started working here the day after his retirement party from the Hanover Road Crew, and was the quintessential French Canadian immigrant with a thick accent and somewhat broken English. He was farmer, logger, baker, town road crew laborer and a trophy strawberry and blueberry picker. He could pick fruit all morning long while bent over the row from his waist. He loved the camaraderie of the Jamaicans and his field crew mates, and had a wicked sense of humor, especially when it came to a prank or practical joke. Roy, our 25 year veteran Jamaican, was eating lunch one day with me last summer and out of nowhere he just started chuckling. When I enquired why, he just said ”…oh my God, ….Old Pep…” and went back to eating his lunch without necessary explanation. He is missed, but not forgotten.