Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Yes, its a bit early this year, and that’s because of our hoop house. With only 6 weeks to go until the target transplant date of April 15th, we’ve got to get our Tomatoes and Peppers going earlier this year.

It’s always a nice day when finally, after months of winter, you can walk to the greenhouse with some fresh seeds, ready to go.

The downsides of this time of year are that we have to lug water by hand to the greenhouse, since all our pipes are frozen and we can’t turn the water on just yet. This gets progressively more sucky as the number of seedlings starts to increase very quickly. Also, for the past number of years the ground seems to have shifted and while the snow melts, it floods the greenhouse, meaning we have to stand in rubber boots to plant seeds. But, we were able to put some tile in so…lets just keep our fingers crossed that that works and we can stay high and dry.

Those are the bees in the front of the greenhouse, wrapped in R10 and covered in snow on 3 sides. I can confirm at this time that at least one hive is still alive and well, I can hear them buzzing away. The other is smaller so might not be able to hear them, and I’ll have to wait a little for a nice warm spring sunny day before I can crack open the lids and have a peek inside.

I’ve been researching “caterpillar tunnels” (these are simple low-tech ‘greenhouses’ that can be set up as temporary and moved, basically just arches with some plastic on them anchored by rebar) as it seems to me we’re going to have a “tomato gap” this season…meaning, we have tomatoes in the hoop house by April 15th, and they’ll be so far ahead, that these determinates will be done and finished before the next tomatoes we plant in the field are ready. A caterpillar tunnel would eliminate the “tomato gap” as we could plant maybe as early as May 15th, instead of waiting and waiting for risk of frost to be 100% for certain gone. And it would really really help those specialty and heirloom varieties reach a 4th and maybe even 5th truss before the cold fall weather does them in, as these varieties are usually 70+ days.

I was hoping we’d have the first few seedlings to take pictures of this week, but we’ll have to wait a little longer.

Graham

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