What can we say, farm friends….winter arrived, and we’ve kind of just been hanging on for the ride. Most of our post-market season so far has been consumed by an intense push to finish our packshed/ produce storage space, and then with trying to keep the farm processes running through the surprise arrival of deep snow and deep cold. We’ve tried to capture some of the past few weeks in photos, below, to give you a sense of winter farming here. Not pictured: building fires in the shop wood-stove several times a night to keep squash, onions, and potatoes from freezing during sub-zero nights. We dream of the day when a thermostat and gas heater will do that job for us in the well-insulated packshed….
Amazingly enough, though, the real news is that we have plenty of fresh food for you all. The farmstore stays well-stocked with roots, squash onions, greens and more, even through this crazy cold; the winter farm members are eating well, and we are even offering (a little last-minute) a Thanksgiving week stock-up box if you are looking for a bulk veggie setup for your holiday meal, or just a big dose for the next few weeks of good eating. To sign up for that, and help us open up some space in our shop and coolers, click here for the simple reservation form.
We’ve almost forgotten what bare soil looks like already, but are extra-glad we got these beds of garlic planted in that first week of November, just in time.
Shortly after that, winter arrived, all of a sudden. A lot of field cleanup, pushed late by the work on the building, is left un-done where it may in fact stay until spring.
Some field cleanup had to happen regardless, though. Here, Hannah helps pick up irrigation pipes in the South pasture so we can pull the chicken barns in later that night. We had to dig them up out of knee-deep snow. While this is probably what many of our temperate relatives think farming in Montana looks like all the time, this was a first for us!
The hardest part of getting caught by winter-surprise was that the chickens, and their moveable barns were still out in “summer pasture” where they are quite far from the electrical hook-ups to run their heated waterers, and far from the water spigots. After a week of twice-daily trips with carts of water buckets, and a constant rotation of waterers thawing out in the greenhouse, we used the snowplow on the tractor to clear a pathway to pull the barns to their winter positions.
Rainbow chard looks extra-colorful against a snowy white backdrop. These greens , carefully covered each night inside of their moveable caterpillar tunnel (in the background) are doing remarkably well considering record-setting cold, with three nights in a row at or below -14.
While the snow piles up between caterpillar tunnels…
…the lettuce inside stayed snug and warm! Or at least alive. We achieved our goal of abundant salad for everyone’s Thanksgiving tables; this is getting washed and bagged up today for the farmstore, farm members, and a bit for the Bitter Root Brewery.
Hannah harvests mild winter salad mix from tunnel 1. The double layers of row cover for getting through the cold nights are folded up in the center pathway. The baby brassica-family greens in the mild winter salad mix are the real heroes of the winter, bouncing back from frozen-solid state over and over again, they’ll be the salad staple for the whole winter, and we just love them.
Beautiful, scenic evidence that we do not win them all….buried under snow in those beds in the foreground is some beautiful spinach. We’re waiting to see, maybe it will bounce back with a thaw, or if we manage to set up a tunnel over it after all? Or perhaps we’ll see it again in spring. Luckily some other spinach plantings in the tunnels will be big enough to harvest soon, but I do wish we had gotten these in or protected before this landed.
Clearing snow from caterpillar tunnels; this helps both to ensure we don’t have any collapses, and also lets more light in to help heat the space.
And finally, a reminder that winter eating can still be full of color and deliciousness! Top your noodle soups with grated purple daikon radish, dish up the big bowls of salad greens, bake a squash pie, enjoy a colorful stir fry or a deep jewel-toned root roast or sautéed chard dish. The farm is loaded with food for you, and we hope you will still eat well!
-with gratitude deeper than the snow,
Mary and Noah, SweetRoot Farm