Welcome back, everyone! Spring’s in full swing and we have been at it on the farm. Spring is a great time for many reasons: migratory birds return, spring wildflowers bring the first color to the new year, and even the snakes, frogs, and bugs are making their way back into our lives. It is truly amazing! For farmers, this is where the rubber meets the soil, where planning meets practice, and where our resting minds and bodies re-energize to meet another growing season. Spring is the time to move!
Most people understand that our work — at least the farming part — is seasonal. However, that doesn’t mean our job ends when winter arrives. Believe it or not, we don’t go into instant hibernation mode to wait for the soil to warm up. It would be nice! But with a farm of this size and complexity, winter is used for planning as much as it is used for resting. For us, planning means looking ahead at the fields we will be using, discussing the known conditions when selecting crop locations, and looking back to see where crops have been in the past so we can avoid buildups of diseases and insects. We also dig through numbers, lots of numbers, to determine if we are planting just enough or too much of any one thing. It may seem as simple as, “If we didn’t have enough, we need to plant more,” but often, planting more can yield less. With a fixed labor force and limited hours in a day, planting more beds of a crop means we have more to maintain. If we can’t maintain beds, or we plant too close to fit more plants, we often end up with less food to harvest. So much of the work is about balance and risk management. 
Personally, I’m a fan of the action part, the place we find ourselves today. At the end of the day, I think we all find it more enjoyable to plant potatoes than to talk about planting them. It’s just not the same! As I write, the crew is finishing our last five beds of potato planting for the spring. With all of the rain this season, our planting windows have been more like planting marathons, but so far, we are right on target. Over the last several weeks, we have had two days where conditions were dry enough to plant. Earlier, we snuck in a bed of spinach here, carrots and beets there, but large crops like onions and potatoes, as well as our spring cover crops, have had to wait. But in just a few good planting days, our fantastic crew came together to plant 16,000 onion transplants; a couple thousand more onion sets for earlier harvest; 12,000 seed potatoes; 3,200 scallion plugs; 2,000 row feet of beets and spinach; 3,500 row feet of carrots; and about 5 acres of cover crop. Like I said, planting marathons!
All this being said, I had to save the absolute best part for last. There is a part of the farm operation that is even more important than planting or planning — and, in fact, is absolutely essential for turning our planning into planting. What could be so important, you ask? Well, it’s the farmers, of course! It is a great joy to have so many familiar, friendly faces back on the farm. A big welcome too, for our new farm crew member, Ashley, who is coming from a season of flower farming in Iowa. We are thrilled to have Ashley with us this year, and equally happy to be working with the rest of the gang: Eric, Cherese, Agustin, Dan, Dan, Dan (was that too many?), Anne, Kaitlyn, Livi, and Erica! There is no way to describe the importance of building strong relationships on the farm and in life overall. It’s easy to get caught up in what we are doing, but whether you’re a farmer, banker, chef, or artist, it will always be the people who make the work special. So, to everyone out there who gets up every day to be the best person they can be, just like our farmers do here, thank you for making this place what it is. Now, let’s go plant!
~Farmer Russ