We are deep in a long standing battle with our neighbors the deer. Due to many factors mostly surrounding suburbanization the deer population has exploded, especially in Loudoun County. I liken the battle to the nuclear arms race. My first volley came in 1992 when I planted one crop on this 180 acres, 1000 tomato plants. I harvested exactly ZERO fruit that season. Can you imagine? The plants were big and healthy and I thought all was well until I ventured into the patch to see when the first ripe one would arrive. I found no tomato fruit at all, and lots of deer poop. Thus the battle began.

We started with one strand of electrified wire around that one acre patch. We moved to two strands, then two whole fences 3 feet apart. Then in 1996 we went big time and put up a “permanent” seven strand electric fence around the whole 50 production acres. It was a huge project, costing a fair amount of money and many people hours. That worked for a few years. Then the second fence outside the first. Then 3-4 years ago 7 foot plastic mesh, attached to the ground with 12″ ground staple so they couldn’t get under the fence. And now, this winter I could see that the deer have started to jump over. So, next week, a company from PA will come down and spend 3-4 days installing an 8 foot woven wire fence. It costs $5 per foot and my fence is more than 8000 feet around, so I am only affording to replace 2900 feet at the most high pressure areas = where I can tell they are jumping over. I anticipate doing this 2 more years until the whole fence is replaced. That’s right, $40,000 invested in keeping Bambi out. As you might imagine I enjoy venison quite a bit, mostly out of poetic justice.

So we are quickly trying to dismantle the existing fence so the new one can get installed next week. That means taking down 20,000 feet of wire, 2900 feet of plastic mesh and many half-rotted fence posts. It’s a big job. Here are two pictures of our worst section in terms of the complex of weedy perennials that have taken hold in the fence line.

I got so frustrated with separating the mesh from the pokey weeds that I brought out the skid loader and just smashed it down and ripped it out of the ground. It was very satisfying. But we still had to roll up the good parts of the mesh and fold up the ruined pieces to throw away.

I’ll show you the beautiful new fence when it gets here.

Spotting is the word we use to describe the act of taking a tiny seedling that’s in tight quarters and moving it into a more spacious environment. Today I spotted the cabbage you’ve been watching develop. I took hunks of seedlings out of the seedling flat and separated them into individual plants and put them into a cell tray. This tray has 72 separate cells. The cell tray is filled with a mixture of “soilless media” (peat, bark, perlite) and my fantastic compost. I make a little depression with my left index finger and then set the tiny seedling into that hole and push soil on top. Now add water and they will adjust to the new situation and start growing again.

Some plants handle this kind of rough activity better than others. Cabbage is in the Brassicaceae family and they are pretty good at being transplanted. Plants in the Cucurbitaceae family are less happy about jostling so we seed them directly into the cell trays, or even seed them directly into the field.

You can see that the greenhouse fills up quickly at this rate. One seedling flat yielded 6 trays of 72 plants. We’ve also been working with many fancy herb plants, moving them for 85 cell trays to 50 cell trays. These are herbs that come from cuttings: rosemary, lemon verbena, tarragon, and lavender. So now the greenhouse looks like this:

We also seeded dill and cilantro for the first time. We put a pinch of seeds into each of the 84 cells, 7 trays of each variety. They will be ready for the field in 5 weeks or so.  Tomorrow we head out into the sunny weather (at least that’s what “they” are promising) to prune our neighbors blueberry patch. This earns us many hours of picking blueberries in July for free!

We grow bedding plants as a way to get the season started at our early markets. Bedding plants are flowering annuals that folks grow for pleasure in pots and flower beds. We buy “plugs” of tiny plants from expert growers from around the country who take cuttings of special plants and root them. They arrive by FedEx and we “bump them up” into 4 inch pots. They grow for 6-10 weeks in our greenhouse and are then ready to sell. We specialize in unusual plants - how else to compete against Home Depot? So, you won’t find any impatiens or marigolds, but lots of gorgeous strange selections.

Bedding Plants

We are also slowly making our way through the top half of the greenhouse, weeding and putting down landscape cloth to try and keep it clean and weed free through the season. We are then setting up our makeshift benches on top of the cloth.

It’s been hard work getting the chickweed out of the gravel, using our fingers and a shovel. The first blisters of 2009 happily reside on my right hand. That’s one of the costs of taking the winter off.

Thanks goodness the weather has been more cooperative these last few days, with night temperatures above 45 degrees. That means the heater has not had to work to keep the plants happy overnight. We run circulating fans at night to keep the warmer air in the top half of the house mixed with the cooler air at ground level. They also keep the plants from collecting so much dew and inviting fungal pests.

As for veggie crops, the chard, fennel, onions and leafy greens are up and growing. This week we start seeding some of the sexy annual fruit crops that make our season prosper: tomatoes, eggplant and peppers which are all members of the Solanaceae family.

We will also head out to the field today to see if it is dry enough to do some early tillage. One of the worst things a farmer or gardener can do to the soil is to work it WET. You end up creating clumps of clay that will plague you for years to come. If it’s indeed dry enough, we’ll till and plant some peas. It’s early, but these super warm days and light winds have dried the top of the soil at least.