Hands and hearts warmed by fire and friends, we turn to the morning’s tasks. After we list the possibilities—some folks can do this, other folks can do that—one seven-year-old “barterer” adds, “And some people can climb the big tree over the ditch!” Chores chosen, we finish our last sips of coffee and head out in groups to begin the new season’s work of waking up the farm in the spring sunshine.
With the bright white peaks of the mountains to the west reassuring us that we will again have water to irrigate the fields, some of us set up a seed-starting assembly line in the cozy greenhouse. While Sarah, Andy, Mike, and Jenny make the mixture we use for starts by combining peat, sand, compost, and soil dug from the fields, Jay, Michelle, and Joe make blocks with a tool that compresses the moistened mix into four cubes that look like chocolate brownies with dimples on top to hold the seed. Last but not least in our assembly line, Julie, Eva, and Deirdre drop and cover the seeds in the dimples of the newly blocked flats.
Since we’ve already seeded the alliums in February, the earliest plants for the bartering crew to start each spring are the brassicas: cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi, and cabbages. As we work, we can’t help but sing a line from our friend Coyote Joe’s song, “The Things You Do”: Kohlrabi just tastes a little bit funny. And it is funny-looking, like a round spaceship with antennaed leaves sprouting from its dome. Together, we fill 38 flats with 50 blocks per flat: 1900 new plants that will be transplanted when the weather warms. Before too many weeks have passed, flats will fill every nook and cranny, shelf and ledge, of the entire greenhouse. With our hands in the soil, we gain a first work morning’s satisfaction of creating nice, neat rows of starts that will provide food for us later in the season.
While some barterers get seeds started in the greenhouse, others work outside in the spring air. The “Garlic Apostles”—Peter, Paul, and Timothy—took a vow years ago to keep the garlic beds weed-free, so this first day they pull the hay mulch back from the shoots to open the field to sun and assess the garlic’s growth since planting it last fall. It’s a little slow to emerge this year after such a cold winter, the green tips just starting to poke through the soil. Some of the soft-necked bulbs will be harvested in early June for green garlic, while the hard-necked varieties will send up curly scapes, thick middle shoots that carry the plants’ seed heads, which we’ll harvest in mid-June.
Scapes are one of the farm’s surprises: we didn’t figure out for many years that they can be pulled from the center of the plant and used in recipes instead of garlic cloves. Equally important, after the scape is removed, the plant then puts energy into larger bulbs below rather than into flowers at the tip of the scape’s curl. The barterers love to harvest the scapes as they compete to pull the longest scape straight out of the stalk with a pop before it breaks off. While the children make scape bracelets by curling them around their wrists, the adults cry, “Look at this one!” when they harvest one they think is the longest. Scapes are an extra gift from an already generous plant—we pick hundreds of them each June.
While some barterers have adopted the garlic, others have embraced the raspberries, which need yearly attention in our perennially grassy plots. Headed by Jan, our raspberry expert, the raspberry crew not only weeds, but prunes the old canes in anticipation of summer fruit. On that first cool spring day, in gloves and coats, Lisa, Emily, and Lindsay make another valiant attempt to clear the plot of the rhizome grass whose roots crisscross the entire farm.
March in Colorado is still intermittently winter; we get our heaviest snows this month, sometimes even into April. A spring snow is wetter than a snow in December or January; it’s the snow that ensures the mountains’ snowpack and readies our soil for the season. Our first gathering in March is usually snowy, but if the ground is clear of snow, some folks spend the morning raking the ubiquitous sticks scattered across the farm by winter winds. With three irrigation ditches running through our land, Stonebridge is thick in towering willows and cottonwoods that grow along the banks. Kunga and the two Amys fill wheelbarrows full of sticks to dump on the burn pile for a spring bonfire, and as they rake, they find new green grass stretching its blades toward the sun.
Before we know it, noon arrives and the first bartering day is done. We’ve achieved much this spring morning: flats of seeds will soon germinate in the warm greenhouse, garlic and raspberry beds are ready for new growth, and the farm has been tidied for another season. More planting, weeding, and watering must be done if we want fresh vegetables this season, but together, the work will be accomplished. Today we have found again the rhythm of the farm, a rhythm that does not hurry but reminds us why we do what we do here at Stonebridge.
In April, there’s mud. Mud cakes our boots as we work in the rain to ready the farm for the members’ first pick-up day in May. We clean the barn, cup up more tomatoes and peppers that were seeded in flats a few weeks earlier, and weed the bluehouse—so called to differentiate it from the greenhouse—where lettuces are slow to grow in the cold weather. Mud is everywhere. Paul carts wheelbarrows full of wood chips to spread in front of the entrances to the greenhouse and barn. The raspberry weeders kneel in mud and when we gather in the Sunflower Room after our morning’s work, everyone’s boots drag mud onto the (mostly) clean floor. April showers bring . . . mud, a part of spring I’m always happy to see pass.
The greenhouse toad came back at the end of April. We first spotted her on the last Sunday of the month, but we suspected her presence for a week before that from the toad-shaped imprint in the muddy spot between the water irises growing in a bucket in our greenhouse pond. We call it the toad throne because she likes to perch there above her kingdom of floating water lilies. Soon she was joined by another Woodhouse toad and, a couple weeks later, we found three baby toads in the pond as well. Each spring I look for toads in the greenhouse. They seem a lucky omen, a sure sign that spring is finally here.
One spring brought another auspicious pair of creatures to Stonebridge. In April, our daughters and son-in-law were at the farm to plant a Black Walnut tree in memory of John’s dad, Noel Martin, who died the Christmas before. As we walked toward the north end of the farm with our shovels and buckets of compost, I noticed wooly owl pellets on the ground under a cottonwood tree that towers over the garden. I scuffed the pellets with the toe of my shoe to find the skeletal remains of mice and voles and birds. Realizing that the pellets marked the presence of the pair of great-horned owls that have lived at the farm for many years, I looked up into the tree to spot a large owl nest of leaves in the crook of the towering limb. “Look, an owl nest,” I announced, pointing to the tree, but it didn’t occur to me that “nest” might mean “babies,” because we’d never seen any on the farm before.
A few days later, I was showing the nest to the Thursday morning bartering crew when suddenly we realized a baby owl was on the branch next to the nest—and then another came into view. Less than a foot tall, they were so still, like outcrops of the limb itself, that it took a moment to realize they weren’t made of bark, but rather feathers, fuzzy like a puppy’s fur, the owlets’ great round eyes staring at us without movement. As their mother watched protectively nearby, we left them alone and quietly picked spinach in the shade of their nested branch. I came out later to snap a few photos of the babies, hoping I wouldn’t disturb them, but unwilling not to document such astounding creatures. I knew that once grown, their parents would drive them off the farm in search of their own food, but for now, they seemed content to venture further up the tree.
Before the subscription season officially starts the second Saturday in May, the barterers plant two big crops on our early spring Saturdays: alliums and brassicas. It takes the whole crew to transplant these crops from the starts in the greenhouse. Planting in the early spring isn’t easy because we’re not in farming shape yet—especially our knees as we bend and stoop to tuck the plants into the ground. Since most of us are decidedly middle-aged, we joke that in a couple years we’ll be making the dimples that mark our planting spots with our walkers instead of with the tractor.
In the early part of the season, getting started on Saturday mornings is a little like revving up an old engine after