Grasshoppers...

...invading the greenhouse.

Grasshoppers lay their eggs in "pods" that contain between 20 and 120 eggs. A mature female hopper lays between 8 and 25 of these pods. Cold winters have no effect on the eggs which will hatch when warm dry weather arrives. The nymphs are substantially similar to the adults when born, though much smaller in size and lacking wings.They mature in 40 to 60 days, so it is critical to address them now.

Grasshoppers are susceptible to a protozoa, Nosema locustae which is available commercially under the brand name Semaspore. They also do not like cold, humid conditions. I have been moderately successful controling them by leaving areas of the greenhouse (a block of bolted spinach) unwatered. The grasshoppers congregate on the leaves of the spinach and can be removed with the vacuum.

The greenhouse is pretty well completely planted save for places I have seedlings sitting out in pots. There are four tomato plants, two bunches of cilantro, two of basil, two four foot rows of carrots, all planted around april 1. A short row of Romaine planted from nursery starts around March 14

Next year, plant starts for lettuce and Spinach in January.

Tired. More tomorrow.

Movable Greenhouse

I have been reading Elliot Coleman's new book The Winter Harvest Handbook and am very intersted in trying his technique of using a movable greenhouse so that the soil in the greenhouse has an opportunity to weather and be exposed to the elements over the winter.

I'm trying to figure out how to extend the foundation of my greenhouse so that I can move it back and forth between two locations. The greenhouse is currently set up on a rectangular frame of 4x4 redwood sleepers laid on top of trench filled with gravel. I'm going to add a second frame adjacent to the existing foundation, directly to the east.

Spring Snow

I was up and about at 6:30 this morning to check the greenhouse. Discovered that the timer on the circulation fan had stalled at some point, so that the fan was on in the middle of the night rather than in the heat of the day. Corrected that. Outside, the temperature felt about 30.

Soil and air temperature in the greenhouse in the mid 50's. Lettuce is growing well. Plenty to cut for dinner tonight.

The tomatoes are not looking exactly lush, they are putting on some new growth, but not bright glowing green. There appears to be a bit of chlorosis. I note that the water walls keep the soil moister than is the case in the rest of the greenhouse. I wonder if the roots are a bit waterlogged. I am going to cut back on the watering a bit.

The spinach is not growing the way I would like. It's growing long and spindly and not putting on a lot of leaves, and some of the plants are bolting. I'm thinking of hacking it back. These are nursery starts, var. "vancouver". Not sure I will do those again. Note for next year to start "bloomsdale" myself.

Carrots are still no-shows at this point. There are about 5 plants, but it looks like I need to replant.

I ran the lawnmower yesterday and picked up about 20 bushels (catcher holds 2bu) of dead leaves, old thatch and other debris. I dumped out the kitchen scraps and covered them with the lawn debris. Took me about 35 minutes to do the back part of the lawn. Would have done the front too, but dinner was ready and I need to move the trampoline and get the kid's toys out of the way first. I planned to do that this morning, but around 7:00 it started snowing hard.

It's actually snowing very hard. Not much wind, but BIG flakes and already about half an inch accumulated as of 8:00. Gray, cold, snowy day.

Inside, seedlings are doing well. I have 3 varieties of peppers and 5 of tomatoes growing well. I also have herbs going. Mint, Oregano, Marjoram, Savory, Coriander. I planted rosemary as well, but it's not coming up.

I worked in the garage most of the day yesterday, and planned to work in the garden most of today. Guess I should have done it the other way. Looks like it will snow all day.

I'm finishing up a seed starting bench to hold the grow lights today. It will support a bank of 6 flourescent tubes in three fixtures over a 2x4 area. This is a large enough space to hold 4 flats. I will be able to independently adjust the height of the lights so that I can start a couple of seed flats and also grow a box of lettuce or some tomatoes.

Not much else to report today. Time to go do something.

One goal achieved

Today I achieved an important milestone in the development of our garden and my skills in managing it. I picked the first lettuce and spinach harvests of the year. The importance of this is that we still have storage onions and frozen beans and peas from last season. This means that we have succeeded in having vegetables from our garden available for our table for the entire year, and that if I am as successful with row covers and cold frames as I was last year, I should be able to extend my fresh food season to 7 months of the year.

I realize that in many parts of the country this is not that big of a deal, but I live in a high mountain valley where the normal growing season is less than 100 days. We are still 2 months away from our last frost (June 17 last year), so to have anything fresh from the garden is an accomplishment.

Keeping the greenhouse warm

My improvised efforts to keep the greenhouse warm appear to be working out. In a week where the outside temperature dropped to 4F, the temperature in the greenhouse has not dropped below 45, and the soil temperature has stayed between 55 and 70. Heat for the greenhouse has consumed 167 kWh since March 20 for an average cost of around a dollar a day.

There is now enough spinach and romaine for daily salads. Tomatoes have recovered from transplant shock and are now growing visibly each day. Only about half of the radishes have emerged, probably because I used last year's seed. I replanted in the empty spaces between the radishes that have already emerged and I planted a short triple row on the other side of the greehouse this morning.

There has been no evidence of carrots sprouting, but I had noticed a large population of ants when I lifted the cover boards. I had been thinking that the ants hauled off all the carrot seeds. But this morning when I checked again, I noticed a number of small, neatly spaced plants coming up. These look like carrots. Carrots should emerge in 14-21 days. Today is the 16th day, so I am going to wait until next Friday before I replant those.

Cold outside. There was about 1/2" of snow overnight, but it is mostly gone now (11:30 A.M) I need to work over the outside beds where some of the grass and a number of weeds have begun to appear. I will do this later in the week after I pick up a roll of plastic film. I need to dig up the beds and then solarize them for a few weeks to kill off the weeds. If I get this done by next weekend, I will be in good shape.

I am putting a lot off until next weekend, but it is a four day weekend, so if the weather allows, I should be fine.

My seed starting is going well. 24 of 30 tomato plants that have out grown the Jiffy flat. 17 of 18 peppers are doing well. All of the herbs are up except the rosemary, which may take up to 21 days to sprout.

I started 72 more herbs at school on Tuesday, March 31, Dill, Oregano, Mint, Savory, Cilantro, and Rosemary. Some of them had sprouted by Friday.

Tweaking the temperature

Overnight low was 14F.

6:00 Outside 14, Greenhouse Ambient 37.8, Greenhouse Soil 44.6
7:00 Outside 17, Greenhouse Ambient 37.0, Greenhouse Soil 43.0 (Sunrise 6:56)
8:00 Outside 21, electronic 64.8, alcohol 58, Greenhouse Soil 44.6 (sun shines more directly on the electronic thermometer)

The sun hits the greenhouse at sunrise, but only for a couple more weeks. Soon it will be shaded by the neighbor's house until around 10:00.

This morning I am checking the temperature every hour, but I have to wait until around 10 before it is warm enough for me to open the door and check last night's minimum.

Looking through the glass, the romaine, spinach and basil all look fine. About 6 radishes are up, as are about half of the red leaf and green leaf lettuce. I can't see inside the wws to check on the tomatoes.

I need to improve my temperature monitoring set up to avoid a false high temperature reading. The thermometer is exposed to the direct sun during part of the day and this gave me an inaccurately high reading of 102 yesterday when the real temperature inside the greenhouse was closer to 80.

At the moment though, my concern is accurate low temperature readings. I have learned the main thing I needed to know, that I can keep the greenhouse from freezing up when the outside temperature falls as low as 4 overnight. Doing so uses about 14 kWh of electricity.

A couple of things I need to do:

The thermometer needs to be installed in an instrument shelter that shades it from the direct sun. This could just be a shallow box that I could attach to one of the tomato towers with zip ties. Maybe a little birdhouse type box, painted white, about 3 inches deep with an angled shed roof to make it look nice. It needs to be deep enough to shade the instrument in the early morning when the sun shine on the east.

I need to move the weather station as well. I should set up everything so that I can go to one place to get last night's outdoor temperature, it would be nice to have a couple of remote sensors to put in the greenhouse so I could read it's temperature directly from the weather station. Expensive though.

Should I put the thermometer and the circulation fan timer and the Kill-a-watt meter all in a box together so that I can check the temperature, read the power usage and control the fan all from the same place? This would be convenient, but it might also mean a bunch of cords and wires all over the place. I don't want to be tripping over cords and it's bad enough with the heater, fan timer and cords where they are now. I guess the best would be to

Is it necessary or useful to regularly check the power usage? At minimum, I should make up a chart and mark down the power consumption once a day. Presumably once the temperature drops below a certain point, the heater will just run continuously. It might be nice to know what that temperature is. Then I could determine when it was no longer cost effective to try to keep the greenhouse from freezing up.

Some Greenhouse Observations

School cancelled today on account of the spring blizzard. This gives me a chance to closely observe what is happening with the greenhouse throught the day, in conditions similar to what I might see in January if I try to keep it going through the winter.

Last fall the greenhouse froze up in late October or early November. I should have logged that here. Oops!

Probably I could have planted in the greenhouse in early February, but I just didn't have the time or energy to clean out the mess I'd left there last fall. But last week I was home for spring break and once I caught up on my sleep I couldn't ignore the greenhouse any longer.

I put in tomatoes and basil, started from seed in January. I also planted 2 short rows (2ft) of lettuce, a short row of radishes, and 4 short rows of carrots. I also noticed that the Walmart was selling spinach and Romaine lettuce starts in packs of 9 for $3.50, so I couldn't resist planting a 6ft row of each.

Later in the week I observed that cold weather was in the forecast. I have gallon milk bottles filled with water around the perimeter of all the greenhouse beds and between each of the planted rows and these do help to moderate the temperature, but there were three consecutive days of cold predicted. I braved the first night of below freezing weather, but the second day was cold and cloudy and the water bottles didn't get enough insolation to warm up so I chickened out and set up a heater.

I found an old electric space heater in the garage. It has a 200, a 300, and a 500 watt setting and an adjustable thermostat. I had to rewire the line cord and plug and clean it up, but once I did, it worked fine. I set it up on March 20 and connected it through a Kill-A-Watt meter so I could see if it was going to bankrupt me.

I set the thermostat through the scientific process of going out to the greenhouse early in the morning, deciding that it was a bit chilly in there and turning up the thermostat until the heater just kicked on. I hung up an old thermometer on one of the tomato cages and made sporadic observations over the next few days, especially first thing in the morning while it was still dark. The thermometer usually read around 45, so I figured that was good enough and I left the whole thing alone until last night. The meter recorded 39.6 kWh as of last night, so the heater used about 6.6 kWh each day. At $.09 per kWh according to my electric bill, works out to about $0.60 a day.

Yesterday afternoon when I realized that we were going to have a real storm, I stopped at Walmart on the way home, and picked up a cheap recording thermometer. The one I bought came from Accurite. It records current temperature as well as min/max for indoors and outdoors. I chose this one because it had a water proof wired probe that is intended to be put through a window to record outside temperature.

I attached the main unit to one of the tomato towers in the greenhouse and buried the probe just beneath the soil at the base of that plant. I finished all of this last night around 9:00 P.M. Inside the greenhouse the small heater was running and the temperature at shoulder level was around 60F. The soil temperature was 55F.

Overnight, the outside temperature dropped to 4F. The low temperature recorded at shoulder level in the greenhouse was 39F. The low soil temperature was 55F.

This morning at 10:00, the inside temperature at shoulder level was 82F. The circulation fan and the heater were both running and the soil temperature remained 55F. The Kill-A-Watt meter read 53.9, so the whole set up required 14 kWh, or about $1.26 worth of electricity to keep it warm during the coldest night I would expect it to see normally.

I don't like the idea of using a lot of electricity to keep the greenhouse warm, but I expect that I will be able to take the heater out by the middle of April. If I can significantly extend the growing season by spending $30 on electricity, I think that is worth the cost.

In future years, I hope to reglaze the greenhouse with double or triple wall polycarbonate, and this will greatly improve the efficiency. But the PC is expensive stuff, I figure close to $1000 to reglaze the whole thing, and truthfully, it doesn't look as nice as the clear glass.

I'll check the temperature about hourly today. I'm interested to see if it gets warm enough inside to activate the solar roof vent, and I want to make sure that the heater is not kicking on when the solar vent is open.

Growing Carrots

I've learned that carrots mostly fail because they are planted too deeply, or because, planted sufficiently shallow, they wash out before they sprout. Here's what I do to avoid these problems:

I prepare a bed of sandy, rock free soil+compost to a depth of 1 foot, water it well and rake it smooth. Then I use a dibble to drill a very shallow (1/4") hole every 2 inches. I place two seeds in each hole. Then I cover the entire row with a length of 1x4.

I leave this in place for TWO WEEKS. At the end of two weeks, I lift up the 1x4 and generally have a nice straight row of little carrot seedlings, sufficiently rooted to escape the danger of being washed away when I water.

The germination rate appears to be very high with this technique, so with new, fresh seed, I'll chance it and only plant one seed per drill.

I try to avoid thinning by planting seeds at the final plant spacing, and with new/fresh commerical seed, germination rates are so good that there is not a lot of reason to overseed. But I do overseed if I am using up last year's seed supply.

When I do need to thin, I clip the unwanted plant at the soil level with a small pair of scissors. This avoids damage to the root system of the adjacent plant, and I have learned to do this with anything that needs thinning.

In my greenhouse and later in my kitchen garden, I plant short rows of carrots, lettuce, radishes and spinach among and between the tomato and pepper plants. By the time the tomatos and peppers begin to take up space, the earliest lettuce, et c. has been picked and eaten and I am taking carrots from my main crop in the outdoor garden.

Cleaning up the garden

What a mess. While I wasn't paying attention, grass began growing in the greenhouse beds and it was a foot tall or more in places, indicating that I could have planted spinach, lettuce and other early spring crops several weeks ago. Oops.

The grass was probably oats or wheat from the seeds left in last year's mulch hay. The mulch itself was pretty much reduced to nothing: eaten by the garden as Ruth Stout would say. Anyhow, I dug up the greenhouse beds with a spading fork and sifted out as much of the grass as I could. Took about an hour all together.

Next I relocated two of my outdoor beds. Last year I made these of 2x6 redwood. They are just simple boxes, 4 feet by 8, held together with lag screws. I tilled up the garden last spring and then heaped up the tilled soil in mounds where I wanted to locate the beds. I set the boxes on the ground in likely spots and then cleared the garden soil from the pathways between the beds, pitching it into the boxes. I used rocks to make the boxes more or less level, raked out the soil and planted.

The boxes worked pretty well except that I should have set them out so that the long demension was perpendicular to the prevailing wind because the wind simply roared through the remay tunnels. True, the seedlings were protected from frost, but the front end gain on my growing season was limited by the wind that withered the plants repeatedly. This year I am re-arranging the garden so the boxes are perpendicular to the wind.

It was pretty easy to just lift up the frames and carry them off to the side. The wood frames, having weathered the winter, are much lighter and dryer than they were last spring. Had I realized this, I would have allowed more time to pull up all the frames, scrub them down and give them a good soaking with lindseed oil before working up the beds. Definitely this is something to put on the agenda for next year. Unfortunately, there is not time this year.

The good news however, is that the boxes are in very good condition, and other than surface weathering, they are sturdy and free from rot and insect damage.

Last year I just about hit the limit for the amount of garden space I can reasonably manage, so this is the first year that I wont be expanding the total area that I am cultivating for vegetables. I learned a few things about efficiency last year and am making some changes for this season that should allow me to get more vegetables with a bit less time and effort than last year.

Some things that I will do differently this year:

Changing the orientation of the beds will not only make it easier to protect them from the wind, but also make it easier to drag the hose around the garden.

Relocating several of the beds will allow me to have 3 foot wide pathways along the long dimension of the beds. Two foot wide paths just aren't wide enough for the wheel barrow and the wagon.

Building an additonal "lift" under the sills of the greenhouse. It would be nice if I could raise the greenhouse up another 3-1/2 inches so I don't bump my head on the roof so much. I can construct an "elevated sill" box of 2x4 redwood and slip it between the sill and the bottom plates. I should be able to do this by lifting the north end of the greenhouse with a pair of crow bars and tucking blocking underneath, then repeating the step on the other end. Then I can roll the sill extention under the sides, tap them into final position and finally, place the end sills in place, screw everything together with deck screws and voila, no more scraping the hide off my skull!

More tomorrow

Spring or Just Teasing

I went out to the greenhouse today. It's been closed down since the end of October because of aphids. Ignoring my own advice, I have all of the garden junk stored in there and there is no room to plant anything at the moment, but it sure was warm in there.

Next weekend I will try to plant something. I have some tomato plants started and I'll start some peppers this week.

Things to plant in the greenhouse:
Lettuce
Radishes
Tomatos
Peppers
Carrots

Outside, it's time to start spinach, lettuce, radishes.

Time to start:
Pumpkins
Cucumbers
Peppers
More tomatos

Things to focus on this year:
Beans
Peas
Tomatos
Peppers

Need to do better with potatos

Need better storage plan for Potatoes, Onions, Carrots

Build better cold frames for the south side of the garage

Planning to make and can large batches of spaghetti sauce

Rototill the back garden.