And seeding won’t end until September – but I feel a bit of relief – knowing that we will hopefully deliver something edible to our CSA come early May. Once we begin heating our propagation greenhouse, especially since it is heated with propane, we try to fill it with seeded flats as quickly as possible so we are mostly germinating seeds rather than just heating air. This past week we have seeded over 180 flats – mostly onions – but a few early brassicas. Our onions require about 8 weeks before they are ready for transplanting to the field and we normally like to start them around mid February so they are ready to be transplanted around the beginning of April. We are a little late seeding onions this season but I don’t see that it will impact our production schedule too awfully much.
Here is an overview of the flats Carl and I seeded this past week. We don’t like to dedicate too much greenhouse space to propagating transplants because after Spring that space would be idle. We have portable propagation benches that can be temporarily set up in a greenhouse, and then once the plants have been transplanted to the field, the temporary benches removed and peppers planted into the ground of that greenhouse so the space is not idle. Our temporary propagation benches are also used for curing onions.
We will be out of propagation bench space mid March, but our plan is to move around 100 flats from the propagation house to another greenhouse, the other greenhouse won’t be as warm as our propagation greenhouse because it will be heated with wood, so I guess we will actually be “hardening” our onion transplants off before they are transplanted to the field. This will be the first time for hardening our transplants off as we are finally getting around in developing a system for doing so. Click here for information about the Gro-Mor that we use to speed up our seeding process.
A few flats of cucumbers that have germinated. Lee seeded these cucumbers for us and they germinated nicely.
Carl is the Gro Mor guru while I make the soil mix and fill flats. I call it the ‘seed mor’ because it allows one to seed more quickly, because you are seeding a row at a time, versus seeding a cell at a time.
The pigs arrived at the farm safely, after riding in the back seat of our truck, however they did puke on the way to the farm because of our curvy roads. Besides Carl and I, we don’t know of many who would let pigs ride in their car, but I do think that Mandy and Sabrina would have, probably others but it is yucky!
3 Little Pigs settling into their ‘play pen’ while becoming accustomed to the farm surroundings. They went from staying at the Hilton (Warren Wilson College) to the KOA Campground (Mountain Harvest Organics). I forgot just how little they can be. They are SO CUTE! Harmon is excited and wants to bond with them but the pigs are a little nervous about Harmon right now so I think we will wait another week before letting them pay together.
