Friday January 17, 2025

Happy New Year!!!  We hope you had a wonderful Holiday season and a great start to the new year.

We have been busy/not busy here on the Farm.  There are lots of things to do but we are not doing them too fast.  That is about to change though as Spring time marches forward.  It is hard to say Spring Time with frigid temperatures in the forecast in the coming days. 

The Strawberry plants have been covered with Frost Covers  We are not trying to protect blooms at this time, instead we are attempting to keep the plants in the upper teens or above.  Mid to low teens are in the forecast for early next week.  The covers normally give us about 5 degrees or so of warmth..  Strawberry plants are pretty cold hardy and will easily live through ten degrees but the emerging bloom is not as tough and could be damaged even down in the crown of the plant..  Generally, we have this artic blast in mid January, a warm up late January and then nuisance freezes between warm spells through February/March.  Overall the plants seem to be in pretty good shape.  We have thousands more viable plants at this time compared to previous years so we are hoping for a stellar season.  Things can change on a dime but ....... so far, so good!

Tulips!  Ranunculus! and more flowers!  30,000 Ranunculus have been planted as well as 90,000 Tulips and a few thousand other flowers.  Tulips will be first in late February followed by Ranunculus in March.  Last year was a tough Tulip season.  We were only able to secure 30,000 bulbs and while they did come up and we had a lot of flowers, the field was just not very impressive.  Hopefully by tripling the planting the field will be more picture worthy and a greater selection of flowers will be available.  Tulip season is a tricky animal with more things to go wrong than right.  Here we go though as we give it another shot.