After 18 days without a drop of precipitation, we are blessed today with rain!

Rain, rain, rain.

A nice soft rain.  It amounted to about a half-inch here.

One good thing about not having rain for so long is that it gave us a chance to get our crops planted in a timely manner.  We did not have to worry about the ground being too wet to plant.  Also we got some new ground planted and the crops established there without weeds overtaking them from the start.

But the soil has been so dry.  We are lucky most of the beds are covered with agricultural fabric, because the high winds would have blown all our soil away.  Every time we needed to till a bed we had to pre-water it so we didn’t lose soil due to the dry and windy conditions.

The ground was so dry the annual weeds in the grass were dying.  This poor frog didn’t stand a chance.  I was glad when Gavin finished installing the irrigation in the new growing areas.

Yesterday we planted the ginger crop in the greenhouse.

The ginger ‘seed’ has been sitting in potting mix in the yurt for several weeks in its pre-sprouting stage.  It was hard to tell if there was anything was going on under there (although I did peek once or twice).  Look at the nice roots and shoots growing on this piece!

The tomatoes in the greenhouse are starting to flower!

Despite the unusual spring weather (is there ever usual spring weather?) things here are off to a great start.  In some ways I wish the markets started this weekend instead of next, because there are many good-looking veggies and flowers out in the field!  I can’t wait to start harvesting them en masse.  We have already sampled the goods and it is great eating home-grown again.  We were so busy with projects this winter that we didn’t do any over-wintered produce, so it has been a long couple of months staring at these tiny plants waiting for them to grow!