Coming to life: Notes on the start of farm season

Heather-Marie inspects a tray of seedlings at Rising Phoenix Community Farm.

Long before the weather outside is hospitable, farmers in Northern Minnesota are hard at work, tricking seeds into beginning the growing process.

Seeds are little pockets of living energy, waiting for the right moment to come to life. The conditions have to be just right or the seed will stay dormant.

At Rising Phoenix Community Farm, just south of Floodwood, Minnesota, farmer Heather-Marie doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for the right conditions. Instead, she works feverishly night and day to gently coax thousands of seeds out of dormancy.

Often symbols of beginning, seeds are living guarantees of continuity between generations of plants. Inside even the most minute, dustlike grain of seed is a living plant.
Nancy Bubel, “The New Seed-Starters Handbook”

Spring has a different meaning in northern Minnesota. Lower latitudes long ago saw the buds on the trees turn to leaves and the crocuses and daffodils poke up through the soil. Those of us here in the Northland are still eagerly looking for any evidence that winter is retreating.

In recent weeks, we have been teased by a handful of warm, sunny days only to have our hopes dashed by harsh north winds, gray skies and driving snow.

It’s enough to make seeds and farmers alike want to stay dormant.

Heather-Marie prepares trays with moist, hot soil where she will plant hundreds of seedlings.

Her notebooks are filled with neatly written detailed recordings of her plantings from year to year that allow her to track progress.

Seeds are kept warm and wet, but they aren’t pampered. They must be strong enough to endure outdoor conditions once they are planted outside.

Now in her eighth year as a farmer, Heather-Marie’s system for the early-season has become almost instinctive. She is decidedly analogue, relying on notebooks of neatly written recordings of each season’s seed varieties, planting dates and orders that help her plan each season.

The farming season began months ago in the darkness of winter as she leaned over a tall table in her tiny house, poring over her notes, lists and catalogues mapping out her strategy.

For most of the vegetables at Rising Phoenix, life begins in the germination chamber. Like many of the projects on her farm, the germination chamber was a collaborative construction project she built with her father, Tom Bloom. One day, while at work, Tom noticed a tall, metal bread rack that had been abandoned by a bread-delivery service. What others saw as something destined for the landfill, Tom saw as a possible piece of farm equipment.

Today, that forgotten bread rack makes up the skeleton of the germination chamber, a brilliantly designed “cabinet” where Heather-Marie puts trays of newly planted seeds to trick them into thinking they are in a much warmer climate than the weather outside the greenhouse would suggest.

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Inside the insulated chamber, the heating element from a hot water heater is regulated by a temperature-controlled power switch that warms a tray of water, making the atmosphere a humid, 75 degrees.

Seed trays are kept moist with a spray of chamomile tea-infused water until they “pop” their heads above the soil. Once they do, they are moved to a shelf of racks where they will go from seedling to sprout, heated by warming lamps. On cold, spring nights the greenhouse glows like a lighted dome that Heather-Marie thinks looks something like an alien spaceship that has landed out on the prairie.

From mid-April into early June, Heather-Marie is a mother to several thousand needy babies. Temperatures can fluctuate from highs in the 70s to lows into the 20s, and in the greenhouse, her job is to ensure that the plants are protected from these extremes.

If it’s too cold, seedlings freeze and die. Too hot, and the plants burn and die. She monitors the conditions using a collection of thermometers, paying close attention to weather patterns to make decisions about when to open the greenhouse to guard against extreme heat or to close things up to protect against frost (sometimes all in the course of one 24-hour period).

While she is diligent about protecting her seeds, she doesn’t baby them. The plants need to be strong and hardy when they are eventually transplanted into the field or the high tunnel. To simulate windy days, a fan blows a steady breeze across the plants. When watering, she will run her hands back and forth across the plants to teach them to rebound and grow strong.

She does all of this while still needing to carry on the business of starting a new farm season: ordering new soil mixes, planning for the start of the growing season and recruiting new members for the farm’s community support agriculture season. And because the farm barely pays for itself, she also has several part-time jobs to earn what is known of in the business as “off-farm income.”

In the first two weeks of the growing season, she has planted somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 plants. Many won’t survive.

On warmer spring days, Heather-Marie can open up the door and window to her greenhouse where hundreds of plants have been growing for weeks. For the months of spring, she must maintain a constant vigil, monitoring the conditions and keeping her seedlings growing strong.

For the next two months, she will never be too far from these seedlings that rely on her for their sunlight, their water and to ensure that they are never aware that just outside a micron-thin wall of clear plastic is a harsh northern landscape.

And the season has only just begun.