We’ve been enjoying the warm up this weekend, both because it has been fun to finally get outside some, but also because it makes all these hours upon hours of prep work that we’ve been doing over the past month seem worth it.  A 60 degree day in January is enough to make anyone accept that winter can’t stay here forever.

I ventured to the apiary yesterday and was happy to see all of my hives still alive and well.  I went ahead and placed “winter patties” on each hive as a backup/emergency feed.  I’ve never done this before, mostly because I tend to leave my bees more honey in the winter than they’ll probably need.  But after losing two hives last winter, I’m not taking any chances.

We were also able to pull the John Deere tractor out of storage so that Lincoln could blow the stink off, so to speak.

He’s surprisingly good at driving forward, though going “bagwards” is still a bit of a learning curve.  I mentioned to Audra today that we should have planned our field pathways to be the exact width of his tractor tires so that maybe he would drive down them instead of through our fields this summer.  I’m not confident that would actually make that much of difference in the carnage, though.  The hardest thing for him right now is that he wants to jump off the tractor every time he makes it go to celebrate the fact that “I did it!”  It’s all very inefficient and exhausting and wonderful all at the same time.  And all this work inevitably creates an insatiable desire for fruit snacks, as evidenced by this photo that he’ll probably regret by the time he’s sixteen.

After nearly two months of planning, re-planning, scheming, and re-scheming, we’ve finally placed all our seed and plug orders for the year.  That’s always been such an exciting moment in the dreary winter months.  When the seeds arrive in the mail with snow still on the ground, it’s a blast of spring winds and summer rains.

This year, though, with our farm dreams expanding more quickly than we could have imagined, we’re still wrapping our heads around the fact that we are growing 50 varieties of flowers and 36 varieties of vegetables.

To add even more adventure, we’re finalizing a hardcore succession planting schedule that will allow us to keep the farm stand stocked with food and tons of vases full of flowers from June until frost. Our little Earthway seeder, our 40-year-old tiller, our menagerie of hoes, and our 30+ year old backs are going to get one heck of a workout this summer.  It’s all very inefficient and exhausting and wonderful at the same time.  I can’t even tell you how excited we are to make this most improbable of things happen.