Well as of today we have filed up our heat bench in the greenhouse. The bench holds 38 trays and each tray contains 72 plants. My dad and have actually become very proficient at planting the trays and it really only takes us a couple of hours to do 38 trays.
Our current planting includes the following: Broccoli, Cauliflower, Leeks, Celery, Eggplant, Kale, Tomatillo's and a selection of herbs. The herbs are the easiest thing to plant as we want more than one plant to grow in each cell so we just sprinkle some seeds into each one. With all the veggies we are more particular and only want one seed per cell. This can be very tricky with things such as celery that has tiny little seeds like the head of a pin. Honestly I'm sure when they are that small there is more than one going into each cell.
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| Planted trays. You can see a little white thermometer to the left. It was almost 40 today in the greenhouse. |
The more time consuming part of the planting process is cleaning the heat bench after being unused all winter. Generally there is just some dirt that need to be swept up and luckily we had already done this. However we do have a low spot in the very middle of the bench where we always have problems with water collecting especially after it rains. Well I knew there was some water we need to get off the bench so on our way to the greenhouse we stopped and picked up a sponge to soak up the water.
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| I know pretty nice sponge eh! It was even made in Canada. |
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Well little did I know that what I thought was just going to be a little bit of water turned out to be a 1.4 of a bucket full of green slimy water with lots of dirt. I ended up using the above pictured container with the sponge to collect the water. The sponge was pretty nasty looking but the above picture is post cleaning. Pretty good I thought.
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| Nice sludge water from the table. Probably would be great on the garden. |
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| Post water removal on the table. You can see that the sand under the plastic is also wet. | |
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On a belated note our winter CSA is finished now. We feel like it went well over all and are looking forward to our summer session which will begin in June!
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| These were the baskets that went out on our the last week. Full of tasty food all from our farm. |
3 comments:
What's a heat bench? How did water get in ...condensation? Are the repairs all done after the wind storm a few weeks ago? What about an overall photo view of a greenhouse from the inside, showing all of the "parts"? (Don't make me come down there with my fish-eye lens!)
If you need a refresher on the heat bench there is a blog post all about here: http://blog.creekshorefarms.ca/2010/03/things-moving-along.html
Repairs have not yet begun on the hoop houses. We are actually moving one up closer to the house to store our soon to be many plug trays. Stay tuned for more details.
I'll will take my camera with me for some more interesting/ education shots of the greenhouse!! Although it would probably be more fun with a fish eye lens.
I should also point out that I will be doing another "Aftermath of Wind" post shortly to describe the journey of our two hoophouses a little better...
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