THIS STUPID RIVER KEEPS COMING UP!!!

It's some cold comfort that this is record-level flooding--the National Weather Service says this is the 3rd highest water levels recorded here.  Nearby towns are flooded and the doomsayers are on the TV news.  We're at almost 7 feet above flood stage and still rising.  They're calling for 8 feet before it starts to recede some time this evening.  It's absolutely screwing us for right now, but at least we can know that this is abnormal.  And hey--if we weren't so behind in our planting schedule, we'd have lost all our first planting of tomatoes, peppers, and squash.  Instead, we'll just have to put them up here in the Alfalfa!  And we might need to modify our business plan a little--we're thinking arks instead of arugula?

In other news, we're supposed to finally close on the property this afternoon--you can imagine our jitters, given that half the flats are badly underwater--and our asparagus has come up!

Johnny Cash sang a song called "Five Feet High & Rising", about a boy asking his mother about the rising floodwaters.  "How high's the water, mama?"  "How high's the water, mama?"  It keeps running through my head.

When you farm on a creek--which is all we've really done til now--when it rains really hard, the creek rises, and maybe it floods.  When you farm on a river, though, you're at the mercy of all those smaller rivers and creeks that feed into yours.  It doesn't even need to be raining--it could just be a heavy winter's snowmelt a hundred and fifty miles away--and that great big river slowly creeps up and up and up.  It doesn't come up fast the way a creek does, but it also doesn't go down fast.  At least that's what I'm learning.

The most frustrating part about it, though, is that on the other side of our little lake is our best bottom field, and even now it's several feet above the waterline except in the lowest corners.  Another dry day or two and we could plow in there, river-be-damned...  except without a ferry, we can't get equipment out there to work it! 

As I'm typing we're almost 3 feet above flood stage, which is a fair bit for a river this big.  It's up into a couple smaller roads, and some of our neighbors with lower fields than ours now have waterfront homes:

It's stressful to wake up each morning and look out the bedroom window to see if the river's worse or better.  It was nearly back to normal 2 days ago, then she started coming back up...  I guess it's just part of the joy of waterfront living.  At least we don't have hurricanes.

Our lower fields are still too wet to get into--just barely, but nonetheless--but the upper fields are totally good to go...  except for the alfalfa.  We're barely hanging on to our revised, less-optimistic schedule as is, though, so we've got to get into that ground one way or the other. 

Alfalfa doesn't have roots like regular grass--it's more like the roots you'd find under a medium sized bush.  Getting all that woody material to break down enough that you can form a clean bed and seed is a time-consuming process.  You plow, disc, then disc or harrow once a week or so until you've wore all the energy out of the tenacious root systems and they've rotted down.  We need the process to go quicker--as in, be done four week ago.  We'd hoped to just drag the bed-former through all the alfalfa trash and deal with it later (famous last words) but it's so woody and thick that it clogged up the tool.  We had no choice but to pull out a steel garden rake and hack at thousands of bed-feet of disced up alfalfa crowns, then pick them up by hand and haul them out of the way to clear a path for the seeder.  It's backbreaking and, frankly, embarrassing--these fields are right by the road--but it cleared the beds.

Once the alfalfa was out of the first few beds, Cara pulled out the trusty Earthway and got down to business.  Neither of us have much experience with the Earthway, though it's the standby for a huge number of tiny market gardeners.  I have to say, it worked better than I expected, but I won't cry when we can afford something better.

The greenhouse has been up and running for a few weeks now, warming our late-but-growing little seedlings.  However, in our rush to get it up so that we could start seeding, we hadn’t finished the floor.  Like our upper fields, the greenhouse was full of alfalfa, which has some serious roots.  Last week I spent a few partial days working on pickaxing the floor and removing sod and roots.  I finally enlisted Luke’s help and he completed in one day what would have taken me a week.  We loosened the dirt with the pickaxe, took out the roots, leveled the dirt, rolled it down and then placed landscape cloth on top.  Today I had to finish the job, and while it took me all day, the greenhouse is tidy, has a floor and is (hopefully mostly) alfalfa free. 

There’s still lots to be done to the greenhouse, but this is a big move forward. 

The nights are still routinely below freezing, but the days are (finally) starting to feel spring-like.

Our fields here are split between the lower fields, in the flats along the river, and an upper field, by the house/barn.  Even on our little 49 acres, the soils vary dramatically from coarse shale to a fine sandy loam to rainbows of silt loams to a narrow slice of nasty, gooey clay.  Our earliest  fields—the ones that drain out and warm up the first in spring—are adjacent to the house.  They’ve been in hay, though, which means that even though the soil is ready, the fields are full of vigorously growing sod and alfalfa.  That stuff is really hard to kill, and it has to be dead and broken down before vegetables can start growing.

We’d been planning on not putting any cash crops in these upper hay fields this season, giving us plenty of time to transition the sod into annual ground.  Our lower fields, though, still haven’t dried out enough to responsibly plow, so we’ve been itching to tackle the alfalfa so we can get something going.  Last weekend the upper ground was ready, the tractor was in the barn…  and the plow was 3 hours away, sitting in a lot where we’d won it at auction.  We didn’t expect there to be a plow we wanted at that auction, and we don’t own a trailer (we rely on the life-saving generosity of JP and Jody at Roxbury), so we attended the auction trailer-less.  As luck would have it, Luke scored a nice little Oliver plow for a song…  and the next morning it started raining and rained for 3 days. 

A couple of warm sunshiney days dried up the field, though, and this afternoon we finally got into the ground.  We’re both still nervous about the heaviness of our lower fields, but this field next to the house is going to be a joy to grow in. Hopefully it will finally get springy and we can get going!