Spring planting for DROUGHT (and a little farmhouse tour!)

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:00]Hey guys, this is Bri here at BLM Branch Farm and today I'm take you around, show you what's happening here in spring, give you a quick little farmhouse tour because we have a fun event coming up this week and I'm going to show you some things we have planted and some things I'm adjusting because of our incoming drought. Let's go.

[00:00:25]Thank you to Quint for sponsoring this video. So, you can see how dry our grass is. We have barely gotten any precipitation. So, typically March and April are our wetest months here in Colorado. Um, but we haven't gotten any at all. So, some of the things I'm doing uh to adjust for that is number one, I'm mulching a lot. So, things like pine shavings, pine needles, chopped leaves, of course, we always love a cover crops.

[00:00:53]And those cover crops are helpful when we have drought situations because what they do is they help increase the aggregation in the soil, that is how it kind of holds together in the structure.

[00:01:02]And so the better the structure of the soil, the more moisture it's going to hold. So compare that to when we till in the spring, that tends to dry out the soil. So definitely not tilling at all this year. You might remember that a couple videos back I did a test, a little sideby-side comparison on some things here in these beds. So I was actually testing a couple new amendments. One is from Just Good Soil that I'm testing for the first time and another is from Advancing Eco Aaggriculture. We can compare the two.

[00:01:30]So I mentioned in that video that I had never used this just good soil. You can see that bed's here. This is the advancing eco aaggriculture bed here. So I treated this one with the soil primer product which is a mix of three different inoculent products. And then this one I did just good soil visually.

[00:01:48]Uh major differences actually. It might be hard to tell in the video, but this the greenness is the same, but this bed here has about 3 or 4 in more of growth on it than this bed. So that means three or four more inches of growth on these oats and peas versus these oats and peas. And then if you compare them to my control, which was the bed that I didn't treat at all, which is this bed here, this one is a much different green. So much lighter green color. Again, some of this might be difficult to see on video, but there is in person absolutely a difference across the three. So again, we've got untreated here, which is lighter green and the shortest of all of them. We've got just good soil treated here, and we have advancing ecoag here.

[00:02:32]So for me, the advancing eco agriculture is the winner. And as I mentioned, they actually have this available this year for home gardeners and market gardeners.

[00:02:42]That's a product that we use at our home farm. It's a watering product. It's been really successful for us at the farm in Minnesota as well as here. As you can see, these cover crops are not quite at termination stage, but we will be doing some termination of them this week. Uh, mostly through cutting and then tarping.

[00:03:00]We could also crimp these and tarp them at this stage. I would like to get a little bit more growth on some of them just to get a little bit more green growth on top for our mulch, but looking pretty good considering we planted this when it was still pretty cold. We've got our solosia all ready to plant out here.

[00:03:17]These soil block solos looking just absolutely gigantic. I mean, look at these. They are huge. Like in relative to the size of step into the greenhouse cuz it's a little windy outside, but like relative to the size of the soil block, these seedlings are huge. We've got our sweet pea trellis here for the year. Now, I don't grow that many sweet peas. And you might remember from the sweet pea video that I did, oh, I think it was maybe last spring. I really always recommend not growing too many sweet peas because what you want to do is keep them deadheaded at all times. If you're growing too many sweet peas, it's really hard to keep up with keeping them deadheaded and then they go to seed. So, when in doubt, grow slightly fewer sweet peas. And I also have them in afternoon shade because again I'm anticipating a super hot dry summer. The more afternoon shade, especially in my zone that they can get, the better. Morning sun, afternoon a little bit dappled shade.

[00:04:17]And then I'm also being sure to mulch over the top of my drip lines. So I do do drip irrigation here at the farm. And it's basically the most efficient means of irrigation that we have. So compare that to overhead irrigation, which is just not that water efficient. you tend to get a lot of evaporation. So, we've got our drip lines here and what I'm trying to do as much as possible. Now, right now, the mulch layer is a little bit scant. Um, I have gone through and I obviously broad fork before I plant everything here. We've got our flocks in. We've got fox glove. We have snapdragons, feverfw, lizanths, more snaps there. We're about to uncover our dalas for the spring. But you can see that right now the mulch layer is a little bit scant and that's just because I don't want to be choking out these little seedlings, right? So if I started to come in and really do a heavy mulch layer here, uh it would be disadvantageous to these plants to do like a really heavy mulch. So instead of got a light layer now, but once these plants grow in, we will go ahead and mulch a little bit thicker right over the top of these drip lines, which will help hold the water in the soil better.

[00:05:26]It'll help minimize any evaporation that we might get otherwise. Let's take a quick look at the field. So, I mentioned that we are still waiting to take off the tarps over our overwintered dios.

[00:05:38]We've got them under a couple feet of leaves and we will actually be digging those up this week during our onfarmm workshop and doing some spring divisions. So, instead of dividing in the fall like a lot of growers do, I divide in spring and that way I don't have to babysit them all winter. We've got one row here. This is going to be direct sewed zenyas. And then back here we have mostly all of our perennials. So things are coming up slowly here. The peianies are always the earliest. You can see they've started to pop up way over there on the opposite side of the field. And then things like the yarao and the oregano, the the golden rod, aers, echgonatia, that's this half of the field is all pretty much native perennials, which is actually great in times of drought because they're already hardened off. Now, they will still struggle a little bit. Even the most drought tolerant plants do like a little bit of water. And like I said, we just really haven't gotten almost any. We've also gotten our straw flower in. We are coming up for some snow on Friday. Um, it's supposed to be 29 degrees and snowy immediately following an 80 degree day because Colorado. Um, but all the things that I have out now are frost tolerant.

[00:06:49]All right, I'm here in the greenhouse.

[00:06:50]So, I told you I was going to give you a little bit of a farmhouse tour today and I'm doing that because we have our onfarmm, our first onfarmm immersive retreat happening this week. So, we're having 12 people here at the farm this week to do an immersive indepth learning how to do all of this stuff that I do here at the farm. And so, we've got a few little spaces I kind of want to show you. I'm here in the workshop and some of you might remember I've been working on kind of making the space feel a little bit more cozy, a little bit more homey. And one of the things that I do is talk about plastic in the garden all of the time. As you all know very well, I talk about how to reduce plastic. And I don't just do that in the garden. I carry all of those same practices over into my home. So when I'm looking for new things like curtains or rugs or upholstery or linens for my beds, I am looking for high quality and I am looking for natural. So I've started sourcing a lot from Quint. And so I wanted to show you these curtains because I have been searching to find room darkening curtains that are made with linen and cotton and not polyester.

[00:07:54]And the reason that I've been trying to be more cautious about what I'm using in terms of fabrics in my home is because a lot of the microplastic contamination that's happening inside of our bodies is actually from microlastics that are shed by fabrics in the home. So one of the things that yes, obviously I'm always talking about it in gardening, but in home it's almost more important. So, it's not just that these curtains are made with natural materials. It's also that they look very, very nice and they serve that room darkening purpose without me having to worry about polyester. Also, if you order something from Quint and you don't like it, it's a 365day return policy, free shipping, free return. So, go check out Quint. If you're looking for plastic free alternative, sustainable options for your home. This is our little greenhouse, and you can see I've set it up kind of like a little bed. It's a little quiet space, so if anybody needs a little getaway from everybody else or just to make a quiet phone call or wants to read a little bit in here, they can come into this greenhouse space for that. Let's go take a look at the table because I have it all set up for tonight. In typical Colorado form, we've got that 40° temperature swing coming up. But for tonight anyway, we've got a beautiful place setting here on the patio, which has a great view of the farm. But my my project this spring is still to convert this whole grassy space into a pond. So stay tuned for that. All right, let's take a peek inside the house. So one of my favorite things is at all of our retreats, including the ones that we do in France, I always like to have a little watercolor area/art area set up so that if people feel inspired to do some painting or some drawing of flowers, for example, they can do that. Uh, this is one of my favorite new things that I put in this bathroom, which is this little wall vase.

[00:09:48]And then you can fill it with lilac. So, if you have a limited counter space, you can still have flowers in the bathroom. I love that.

[00:09:58]Got our little mud room here. Here's Bailey. Over here, we have our little coffee and tea setup for everybody. And then up here in the front room is kind of set up for a little reading nook. So if anybody wants to just kind of have some quiet time, they can sit and look at some of my favorite gardening books here. Lots of great ones to choose from. So just kind of a nice little quiet setting.

[00:10:29]This is a little bit of a random video, but I hope you enjoyed it and I will be next week. We are if you are interested in attending a workshop at the farm, make sure you go to our web page which is blossomand branchfarmm.com. All the way at the bottom you can sign up for our newsletter. Sign up there and you'll be notified because I think what we'll do is a late summer one that's more flower arranging focused. So if that sounds interesting to you, make sure you sign up. I will see you guys around here next time at the farm. Don't forget to like and subscribe and we'll see you guys around here next