Two Feet in the Dirt

It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter with snow over the weekend and temperatures not topping freezing tomorrow. I’m thinking fondly of those unseasonably lovely days just after Thanksgiving with highs in the 60s! With the end of the year just around the corner, we’re at last starting to see an end in sight for all of the work we planned for the fall. We are on the last stage of the deer fence installation- putting the actual fencing in- and like almost everything else we’ve tackled over the last few months, it is more time-consuming than expected. Watching the how-to videos, it looked like a simple process of attaching the fence to the posts, but the reality of dealing with uneven terrain and sealing endless numbers of zip ties with almost-frozen fingers is a little more difficult than I thought it would be. 

It’s good timing for getting the deer fence up, though. While we planted most of the beds with cover crop for the winter, I chose to cover about 4,000 square feet of beds with a tarp. We’ll be able to plant in them much sooner in the spring because we won’t have to deal with mowing the cover crop and tilling before planting, a job that can become quite delayed in wet spring weather. However, last week, a deer walked right across the middle of the fairly expensive tarp. Coming from farming in the city where I didn’t have to worry much about large animal pests, I was both surprised and ticked off when I came out in the morning to find hoof-print holes right through the middle of the tarp! (To be fair, I can imagine it was a somewhat unnerving nighttime experience for the deer as well.) This definitely helped me get my priorities straight, though, and we decided to push a couple of things back and get the fencing up right away. 

Otherwise, we’re just settling in for the winter and planning out all of the inside work, from seed orders to farmers market applications, that we’ll need to get done. And despite putting only a modest amount of time into our small garden, we’re still harvesting some cold-hardy crops and enjoyed both fresh cilantro and spinach in some tasty enchiladas over the weekend!