Complimentary Blueberry Juice

I’ve finished my first draft seeding schedule for 2026, which is way ahead of my usual timeline for doing so. We’re aiming to go hard for early spring production, and I didn’t want the distraction of needing to complete this in March.

While this process has been streamlining itself and every year gets faster to complete it, this season was a bit of extra work, to re-analyze everything that was possible to get earlier and make adjustments.

The draft hit 301 line items, stretching from March to December.

There are fancy programs out there that will just do this for you, but I don’t see the point in skipping the mental exercise that is evaluating the entire season before it starts happening and having a computer do it for you.

This sort of schedule is now tailor-made for our farm and what works best for us, I wouldn’t trade that to a paid application for anything. In re-analyzing everything from last season, I catch many mistakes, and use the schedule to make my notes as I go. By this time I forget all those on-the-fly decisions that we made last year. A lot of them worked, some of them didn’t.

The thing I learned most with this season’s analysis is that we seem to be really scared to plant things early. We’ve made mistakes planting early before…but those mistakes were usually things like..we were too lazy to put a row cover on something, and it went down to -2C. So we went with a later schedule, and ran into problems with hot dry conditions for cool weather plants. Now I think we have the experience and the incentive to just go for it.

Another place of big adjustments was the fall planting schedule. We tend to wait too long when the daylight hours keep shrinking, and we learned a lot with our new hoop house last season. We can both have a lot of stuff out in the field into October, and not rely on our hoop house too early. In other words, we can go for a really big season extension.

This whole thing will get one final edit before March, I’ll re-do the math, and double check I didn’t miss anything. Then it all goes on a clip board and we use it as a guide, changing the rest of what’s required on the fly, as per our farmer reflexes.

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice