Farm Tour Friday 1/14/2022
It’s Friday. Go us of making it through a freezing dark January week. The sun did shine a bit and the propagation house was warm but man it was a cold one this week. We woke up to 7 degrees one morning and the first thing I did was huddle up next to the fire with a hot cup of tea. It seems like this time of year we spend a great deal of time cutting firewood, bringing firewood into the house (which is my girls daily chore), and taking care of the fire. I don’t mine this task because most of the time everyone in the family helps.
Even though it was cold in the early part of the week we were able to get a good deal done. First we finished potting up all of our heirloom chrysanthemums that were in one of our high tunnels for fall flower production. We have a collection of 35 different varieties of heirloom chrysanthemums ranging in color and types. Once you go down the rabbit hole of mums its hard to just have a few. They will now live the remainder of the winter out in our propagation house. This is a prefect place for them as we keep the temperatures around between 45-50 degrees. Once they start growing we will take cuttings to create more plants. We do this each year and with a few mother plant we can create thousands of new plants. This year we dug up all of our plants and we have big plans for our mum cutting this spring.
Next on the never ending to do list was to soak the ranunculus corms for pre-sprouting. The ranunculus gets soaked in aerated water for a few hours before potting them up in 72 count trays. We pre-sprout the corms to give them a head start before planting them in the ground. Sometime they will rot in this process if they are too warm, too wet, or if they freeze. We try our best to prevent all of those from happening, but if they do the corms are separated by the cells in the tray and won’t infect any other corm. Ranunculus like cool soil that makes them a perfect flower to grow during the winter months as long as the soil does not freeze. We can’t wait to see their lovely blooms again in the spring.
We ended the week with anemone planting. The anemones that we had potted up a few weeks ago to pre-sprout were ready to go. They had developed great roots and started growing leaves. Anemones are a great crop to grow in the winter as they like cool soil just like the ranunculus does. We are looking forward to seeing them grow and bloom. A few of our summer team members worked for us during their break from college and we were able to accomplish so much. Of course the todo list was much longer. I always think we can accomplish more than real time allows. To say we need more team members is an understatement.
The temperatures at the end of the week was just above freezing and it felt like a heat wave compared to the beginning of the week. I heard that there is a large snow storm coming our way on Sunday night. I know my dad and I will be prepping for that and I will let you know if we get the 12 inches of snow that is predicted.
Have a great weekend! Thanks for joining me for Farm Tour Friday.
