AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes: Luckily, the hours of daylight are getting more abundant, because the season of "not enough hours in the day" has exploded upon us. Along with the crocus, aconite, snowdrops and now daffodils, we are seeing scallions, garlic, chives, horseradish, rhubarb and Japanese butterburr emerging from the ground. Overwintered leeks, parsnips and (maybe) carrots are being reborn, signaling that it's already past time to get the vegetable garden under way in earnest. Mostly, it's a matter of planting flats in the greenhouse where the peas, three kinds of cabbage and cauliflower have already germinated and fava beans have been planted. Carrots, beets and spinach need to get planted outside this weekend.
We've already placed our order for turkey poults to arrive, as usual, the last week of April. That means it's also time to start preparing the hayloft of the barn, fixing the chicken wire that keeps them in their brooder pens and keeps predators out, cleaning the feeders and waterers, putting down paper and peat moss, and hanging the heat lamps. I savor March and April for the temporary respite from our stratospheric electricity bills. This winter, keeping water unfrozen for all the animals and boosting the heat in the greenhouse seems to have tripled our normal bill. When we put all the lamps on to warm all the newly arrived turkey poults, guinea keets, goslings, chicks, and ducklings in May for the weeks until they feather out, I expect we will get "Welcome Back" cards from our friends at National Grid.
Meanwhile, it is a job just to keep track of all the animals being born in every corner of the farm. The last two years, our mother daughter pair of British White cows, Donita and Roxie, calved a week apart, first mother, then daughter. This year, daughter Roxie calved first, last Wednesday (another heifer calf). Now Donita, from the growing dimensions of her udder, is about to follow suit. We wonder whether the switch signifies a shift in dominance as the younger cow comes into full vigorous maturity and the mother enters her golden years. They function like a family, but I'd prefer if Donita, the more docile and friendly of the two, were to continue to set the tone. One of our two new Ossabaw sows, Jane, farrowed on Sunday. Will Eyre be next, we hope? She's not letting the piglets out of the hut yet, so we're not even sure of how many there are, but so far have been disappointed to see only three. In any event, it's time to start arranging to castrate any males among them.
And just when we thought we were done with lambing, our youngest breeding age ewe gave birth Tuesday to the 22nd lamb of the season, and one of the older ewes we thought had taken a pass this year looks ready as well. Suleyman's proficiency as a breeding ram has been confirmed once again. For those of you wondering about his fate, Peter has found a new role for him as premier ram at a farm in Pennsylvania. Actually, it is the same one from which we got our original four ewes (Marina, Brigit, Mira and Kybele)—all of whom have been with us since 2001. And so we come full circle. We've been trimming the hooves of as many sheep each weekend as I have the strength to wrestle into the hammock where we immobilize them, and Peter has the endurance to contort himself on a low stool to do the trimming. Peter jokes after doing the fourth hoof that he's glad we're not raising centipedes. But now we have to add banding the scrotum of the latest new ramling to our to-do list, just ahead of photographing and getting our registration records in order.
For all this busy-ness with new life, however, my top priority these April weekends is completing the trimming of the berry bushes and fruit trees before bud break, and obliterating all traces of the black knot, which has decimated our plum trees. This is, perhaps, the only part of our life in which Peter finds me too thorough about completing a job. He told me last weekend that he thought I had cut too much out of the gooseberries. It's true that in a couple of cases I took what appeared to be a complex bush and reduced it to two or three young stalks. But our gooseberry yield last year was disappointing and I don't think it was just the dryness; I want to encourage new young growth. I take as my Bible the excellent Backyard Berry Book by Stella Otto, which has a section on each berry and its pruning rules, different enough from each other that I have to re-read the pertinent sections of the book to refresh myself before each pruning session. In the case of gooseberries, it instructs that they are produced on the young gray shoots and that the dark, woody stems with multiple branches that are four or more years old should come out. I've finished all the raspberries, the main patch of blackberries (above), and most of the gooseberries, while Peter has been pruning roses and distributing compost to the bushes. The daunting job of doing the currants still awaits. There is something intensely satisfying about reducing a messy tangle of branches to a select few strong stalks, and something remarkable to me about the idea that by reducing the number of branches one increases the yield and size of the berries. I guess it's just another manifestation of how the life force that is expressed every spring emerges into the world so insistently and in so many different ways. For the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.
