May, and the farm is springing to life. The daffodils are now in full bloom, their yellow heads nodding in the breeze. It’s warm enough to let the chickens outside of their winter quarters, and they’ve been spending their days happily scratching in the soil for tasty bugs and worms. And in the field, the garlic and the rhubarb are thrusting the green fingers of their first leaves through the straw mulch layered on their beds. The farm work is springing to life, too. Each season, I’m always surprised by how April goes from a dead standstill to a full sprint that lasts from now until the beginning of August.

This spring we made the big decision to have the field tiled, which finally happened late last month. This entailed having some really big equipment on the farm to lay perforated drain pipe deep in the subsoil to help the field drain more quickly. Long term, this investment should eliminate all the time we currently lose to waiting for the soil to dry out after big rainstorms, which is great. In the short term, however, it means we weren’t able to get into the field at all until after the tiling was completed, so we have a little catching up to do, seeing as how the greenhouse is jam packed with plants ready to get out into the field. This coming week should see us catching up with our spring seeding and transplanting and should put us on track for the start of the CSA in June.