Today marked the start of week 10, our last week of the quarter before Evaluation Week. Evaluation Week is just when students meet with their professors to go over the work of the quarter and evaluations, your own self-evaulation of your work, your faculty’s evaluation of that work, and your evaluation of your professor/the program as a whole. Pretty low pressure, especially if you’ve been putting in all of the hard work through out the quarter. So basically, the most stressful week is week 10 as that is when all of the projects are wrapping up and all of the hard deadlines are truly looming. Thus, it was also the last Monday of my internship at Thistlehook.

Cerinthe transplants

The temperatures started out below freezing but ended up being in the seventies by the time I left at 3PM. Once it got into the mid-40s outside, we transitioned to preparing the bed where the Matthiola and Cerinthe were to planted. Doug had already removed the occultation tarp over the weekend to let the bed dry out and had Phalin power harrow the bonemeal (used as a organic fertilizer to boost Nitrogen in the soil) in. We set up drip tape (slowly drips out water rather than overhead irrigation that sprays water; conserves a lot more water over time and better for smaller plants). We also put up the support for the row cover that will keep the plants warm and pest-free. Then we got to planting. We planted out two 72-cell trays of Matthiola (one of each variety, Glory Lavender and Noble White) and two and a half 72-cell trays of Cerinthe (Kiwi Blue variety). The bed is 75 feet long, and we planted three rows of each. The Matthiola spacing was 6-8 inches apart and the Cerinthe was a foot apart. The Matthiola’s roots were not as mature as the first two flats of Cerinthe which were nearly pot bound, meaning the Matthiola takes a little longer than the Cerinthe in terms of days to maturity in the greenhouse. It was also interesting to see the first two trays of the Cerinthe (seeded 2/5/18) which were just past prime for transplanting versus the half flat of Cerinthe we stuck into the bed (seeded 2/13/18) which were not quite ready to be put out into the field (roots not quite long enough, stems kind of flimsy). It’s awesome that we were out transplanting today and it definitely has me excited about the fact that spring is so close.

Everything was blooming on the farm too. The Prunus mume (Japanese apricot), plum, Asian pear, and apple trees were all flowering or pushing bud. The crocuses and daffodils are even past peak! If you were to walk around the Capitol campus (or really anywhere down-town Olympia) all of the cherry blossoms are beautiful. Definitely worth a walk to go see all of the new flowers!

Daffodils blooming

Plum blossoms