Huddled Hens and a Hoop House

Winter finally arrived last week, greeted by puffed up chickens.

Our farm is a wide open parcel of land on a hill, and when the wind whips, the Scottish moors come to mind.

But in the late fall the chickens shed their old feathers and grew vibrant new ones - the molting process - so they've got lots of nice insulation. Yankee had the toughest molt, and her big, beautiful upright comb still isn't the same. Here she is mid-molt. Can you say pitiful?

The humans, at least, are happy to finally have winter. December was *the* warmest and wettest on record for the contiguous United States. The plants and trees were confused, and many of our strawberry plants formed fruit that was subsequently zapped by January freezes. The blueberry bushes were dangerously close to breaking bud. Global warming, El Niño and the jetstream are to blame. Here's a succinct explanation of what global warming could mean for farms.

As for the harvest, the cabbage is done, and we'll clear out the turnips next week. Spinach is growing at a winter pace and will be cut as whole plants in late February.

The 300 feet of garlic is doing great. A volunteer and I broke heads into cloves and pushed each one a few inches into the soil, spacing them five inches apart, then added a three-inch layer of leaf mulch.

And the biggest news: we're getting a hoop house!

We tilled up the garden where it'll sit, in preparation to grade the area flat.

We'll assemble the kit in March, a roughly four-day process. Here's a picture of the process, taken at a workshop at the Crews and Brodie Farm, an urban community farm in Henderson, N.C.

The steel structure, covered in a sheet of plastic, extends the growing season by insulating row crops during cold periods and, in a nutshell, reduces the spread of disease, insect damage, erosion and weeds. In a future post I'll go into more detail about all of the benefits.

We'll also use the hoop house, or high tunnel, as a temporary greenhouse for growing seedlings.

That's the latest round-up. Thanks for reading!