It’s been a few weeks since I posted one of these, sorry about that. Last week I put many little tiny plants into the ground inside our field greenhouses. It took me all week long, and by some miracle I can still move around normally. But during that little planting episode, I couldn’t even drag myself to the computer. The week before that, I don’t know what my excuse was, confused by wacky weather? Snow silliness syndrome? I guess the month of March is always this way, finicky, loves me, loves me not weather. Well, snow or no snow, the greenhouses are loaded with growing vegetables for early April harvest. Colin has been trekking to and from our field amendment supplier in Chehalis trading all our money for truckloads of fertility. To the twenty CSA members who chose this week to send in your payments, THANK YOU SO MUCH!! You pretty much bought field two and three some fertility for the season, and I was getting powerful curious about how that was going to happen.

Today, Colin and our friend Wes are rebuilding our walk in cooler, replacing rotten wood parts and such. We have been reviewing our plans and maps of where it’s all going to get grown, making sure we agree on at least that much. Colin wanted to argue some about which varieties of tomato we would grow, but that was over quick because I had already ordered seed last month. Not argue like fight, just argue the merits of this one or that. Tomatoes are particularly charged, maybe because they are just so luscious, inspiring passionate opinions. We actually agree that our favorite tomato of all time is the Brandywine but we don’t grow it. Brandywine is a big fat gnarly heirloom beefsteak tomato that almost always cracks. They don’t make it to market looking pretty, and they only put out a few treasured fruits, just not a good choice for the business end of things. Now, Pink Beauty on the other hand, is as delicious, and prolific, as it is lovely, so we grow a lot of those, along with Cosmonaut Volkov, Paragon, Big Beef, Trust, and Buffalo. Those are the names of all the greenhouse tomatoes. Sungold cherry, Amish paste, Heinz, and Super San Marzano will all grow outside at our home field, site one.

Now I just want to go on and on about the names of all the seeds we are growing this year, but I’ll keep it down to one more kind of thing, the eggplants. We planted some Galine eggplant seeds for regular big purple glossy ones, Calliope for cute little round ones with white stripes, and then a trio of striped, purple, and white ones called Fairy Tale, Hansel, and Gretel. Cute, right?