Spring 2025 Seasonal Update: Farm, Garden, and Kitchen

Spring has sprung!

Our apple trees are blossoming, we’re hurrying to plant as many things as we can, and the cows are providing us with steadily increasing quantities of thoroughly “grassy” tasting milk as their bodies adjust to the rich spring pasture.

Here’s a roundup of a few things we’ve been up to this season: on the farm, in the garden, and in the kitchen.

On the Farm: Pasture Seeding

What should you do with patchy bare spots in your pasture upon which you envision a lush carpet of grass and other delectable cow treats?

In the past, we haven’t done anything.

Partly because we felt overwhelmed in the spring with all the other things we had to do.

Partly because we hoped that with careful management practices (which we’ll explain in a different post) these areas would slowly improve on their own. Well, they probably will slowly improve, but the pace is slower than we’d like.

This year, we seized the bull by the horns, and decided to expedite our pasture improvement with a little pasture seeding. As with many other tasks that we have put off or avoided, it really wasn’t too hard at all. In fact, it was a simple as taking a trip to our local farm supply store to pick up a bag of pasture seed mix and a handheld rotary seeder, and taking a walk through the pasture scattering seed on any patchy areas with carefree abandon.

We were strategic in our timing, starting with one round during freezing weather, (some seeds need cold exposure to germinate), and a second round before a week of wet and rainy weather.

We hope our efforts will be rewarded with yummy grass for our cows, and yummy milk and beef for us.

Of particular interest is the above area, which was more than a little patchy, due to its past as a wintering spot for our cows. With a winter’s worth of dropped hay, trampling up and down, and cow manure, it’s full of fertility, but lacking in grassy plants. We hope by the end of the summer it will be a nice piece of pasture.

In the Garden: Homemade Plastic Cloches

We’ll be updating with the results of our winter sowing in another post. So far, we’ve had some great seedlings to plant out, and some total losses, while others still await their final fate.

In the meantime, here’s a new gardening trick we’re trying that seems to be working wonders for our direct seeded cabbages.

Cabbages are supposedly frost hardy. However, the loss of more than a few cabbage plants to a late frost last year has made us wary.

“If only,” we thought, “there was a way to provide them with just a little protection in this delicate stage.”

After flipping through some gardening books, we found this idea:

These handy dandy homemade plastic guards serve a few purposes:

1. They keep conditions moist until germination.

2. They save the seeds from being buried under woodchips.

3. They offer some protection against slugs and other critters that would like to demolish our baby plants (along with our hopes and dreams) in just a few bites.

4. They form a barrier against frost.

They are apparently providing some grass with nice growing conditions too.

The plan is to keep them on until the plants outgrow them. By then we hope our plants will be big enough to stand up for themselves.

Results: so far, so good. Our cabbage seeds underneath these actually germinated faster than the radishes we planted right next to them.

It turns out that this brilliant idea is actually an official gardening “thing” called a garden cloche. But instead of spending a dollar apiece for the official ones (which adds up pretty quickly if you have a lot of plants), you can make your own by cutting up used plastic containers.

It’s really as simple as it looks. Use several empty plastic containers (sawn off if needed), and press them into the soil or mulch so they cover your seeds. It’s important to provide some air vents. Cut off bottles work particularly well as you can simply leave the cap off. Other containers need to have a few holes made in them. Also, make sure you bury the edges deep enough that they won’t blow away easily.

We also must point out that these may be slug-proof, but they are not one-year-old-proof. So keep irrational small people clear of the area unless you want them to think you are offering them an exciting new toy.

In the Kitchen: Eating Dandelions – Crazy or Brilliant?

We’re eating from our land earlier than ever before this year, and it’s not thanks to a fancy new greenhouse or a brilliant new gardening strategy. It’s actually all down to a plant we’ve grown with exactly zero effort.

Want to know the secret?

We’ll start with a joke:

Q. What’s another name for a struggling gardener?

A. A forager.

This is a joke. Sort of.

But seriously, nothing sharpens your appreciation for edible leaves that grow abundantly everywhere by themselves like several years of failed attempts to grow spinach.

We used to be of the opinion that eating dandelions placed people squarely on the “weird” end of the spectrum. But this year, we decided it might be time to reconsider.

Reader, if you are mentally placing us on the “weird” end of your own mental spectrum, we’d challenge you to read the following four part defense of dandelion eating before making your final judgement.

Consider the following:

a. It only makes sense to us, that the plants that grow abundantly in the place where you live at a certain time of year, are probably a good fit nutritionally for what your body needs at that same time. Why dandelions in the spring, you ask? One theory is that the bitter compounds in dandelions and other wild spring greens help replenish your stomach bile to prepare for the coming season of plenty. Fascinating! But if thinking about stomach bile turns you off your dandelions, dismiss that reason from your mind. We have a few more without it.

b. This blog is not intended to be medical advice, but according to the experts, dandelion leaves are full of important nutrients. Really, there’s no reason to think they’d be less healthy than their more socially acceptable relatives like spinach and kale.

c. Add to this the benefit that you can eat dandelions absolutely fresh, instead of having them after they get transported from goodness knows where for however long that takes.

d. At the end of the day, a leafy green is a leafy green. Come on! Especially by the time you sauté it or slather it in oil and vinegar, there’s not a whole lot of difference in flavor. (Except we have noticed that anything homegrown is more flavorful than its grocery store equivalent). Sure, they may be slight variations in flavor. But only a true kale connoisseur (aka a rabbit) is really going to be able to tell you what species of leafy green they happen to be nibbling on. Why not eat the one that you can harvest without any prior labor?

An additional discovery we’ve made this spring is that, just like the leafy greens in your garden, dandelion leaves taste less bitter when picked before the plant flowers. They are really quite tasty. Not in a chocolate cake kind of way, of course, but in a fresh and enjoyable way nonetheless.

Now, we recognize that it may not be socially acceptable to show up to a potluck with a bowlful of dandelion leaves. Also presenting your dinner guests with a plateful of dandelions may raise some eyebrows. We haven’t had the nerve to try either.

But we’ll add to this apologia for dandelions the observation that our culture’s attitude towards dandelion eating is really more of a condemnation of the culture itself, than of the dandelions. Think about it this way. How disconnected must we be from, well, reality to look sideways at a friendly little plant that everybody recognizes and not blink an eye at the leaves that come all wrapped up in plastic from goodness knows where?

Finally, did we mention, that dandelions grow all by themselves, people? Nutrient dense, delicious, and low-maintenance. They’re not weeds. They’re a gift from God to the horticulturally challenged.

Our favorite ways to eat dandelions have been sautéed in butter with salt and pepper, or incorporated into a tossed salad.

If you too, would like to welcome spring with a bowlful of fresh dandelions, we’d be thrilled to hear that you’ve joined team dandelion.