We planted peas, spinach, and scallions last week and more scallions today! Salad turnips are up and looking good. Tomorrow we move our tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant out to the hoop house (time to harden off, little babies : )
Tilling, tilling, tilling....
Hoop house filling up with seedlings...the peppers here (in the newspaper pots) are the ones that will be on sale in a few more weeks. Great because you can plant them in the container straight into the ground!
Stormy April weather...
More coming soon!
Showing posts with label hot bed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hot bed. Show all posts
Monday, April 19, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
Tilling Thrills
Though it is snowy today, we took advantage of the warm weather this past week to plant our greens (chard, kale, collards, and mustards) and our peas and salad turnips. The soil was still wet at the beginning of the week - too clumpy and muddy to till. We really wanted to get our greens in the ground, so we used a no-till method where we dug a hole for each plant and filled it with a mix of compost and soil. (We have some great compost by the way - half mushroom compost and half 2-year compost!)
There's still sod throughout the bed so we are mulching with cardboard to keep weeds and grass down. On Wednesday the soil was dry enough to till . You can see the tilled bed behind the tiller. This was the first time that I (Annie) used a tiller and I had a great time learning!
Here's Megan adding the compost to the beds which we rake in before planting.
We put up the greenhouse plastic last week and got some babies situated on top of the hot bed. We also put together our weather station so we can monitor air temp, soil temp, precipitation, humidity, and barometric pressure as the season progresses.
That's all for now. Be sure to check out our new Thank You page!
Labels:
hoop house,
hot bed,
seedlings,
tiller
Friday, March 26, 2010
Keepin' warm in the spring chill...
This past week we have been building out at the farm. We took down the hoop house from last year, cut it shorter (from 10 feet in height to about 7 feet) and expanded it an extra 20 feet in length. The plastic goes on next week!
This is our "hot bed" that will be inside the hoop house. Cinder blocks filled with horse manure - simple yet effective. The manure gets to be 120 degrees (F) or more (and really, doesn't have much of a smell at all : ). We'll lay boards on this then keep some of our more sensitive seedlings on here so they stay nice and toasty.Another way to protect our plants is with cold frames. This lovely one we build with recycled storm windows, recycled wood, and straw bales.
Our new compost bin made from pallets and scrap wood - the chickens' new favorite hang out!
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