Yesterday’s harvest that went to today’s farmers’ market, my earliest market start by almost two months! From the unheated greenhouse: kale, green and red mustard, and lettuce mix times two. Harvest conditions: -2°C outside, a perfect-working-weather 10°C inside. At the end, the sun came out and it started to get sweatingly hot under a T-shirt, shirt and fleece. But, already done! No rinsing, just covered and into a cool room for a 6 a.m. pick-up this morning. It felt a little odd, starting the year’s Saturday markets so early, and indoors—this fall, if all goes as intended, weekly market will cease to end for winter and become instead a fully year-round thing…
Greenhouse
The basic tiny farming greenhouse is a steel-ribbed, plastic covered hoophouse, the bigger, the better for season extension.
Winter salad
This bowl of lettuces and kale is the first cut of spring, taken from the unheated greenhouse while snow flurries whip around outside. With the help of 6 mils of plastic and some row cover, the salad easily survived three months of winter, with temperatures that went down to -30°C (-22°F). The texture and color are good, the taste, deliciously bold. Fantastic! The flowers are bok choi that managed to bolt in the alternating warmth and cold—on sunny days, the hoophouse temperature could easily reach 10-15°C (50-59°F), even when it was sub-zero outside. Interesting!
Sundown in the hoophouse
Not your typical postcard sunset, and it’s kinda chilly, damp and mucky in here, even as the temperature outside slides down to an overnight -15°C (5°F). But it’s all about the greens, tucked under a couple of layers of row cover, maybe not exactly cozy with only ground heat to keep them warm—who knows how they’re really feeling—still, well-set to survive another sub-zero night. With that in mind, sundown through 6 mil plastic is a cheery-enough sight to see!
Cold crop lettuce
Lettuce in the unheated greenhouse, under a couple of layers of medium-weight row cover, is doing fine so far, firm and tasty after weeks of sub-freezing nights, all the way down to -30°C (-22°F). Now there’s even a noticeable bit of grow-back from the last cut, late December (even the weeds are getting in on the protection, see bottom left). My first full-winter tiny farming experiment continues…!
Wire work
Electric fence wire work, snipping 6-foot pieces of 9-gauge wire for hoops to hold up floating row cover in the greenhouse. Hopefully this wire is stiff enough to do the job, supporting up to three layers of row cover, heavy with moisture from humidity and being dripped on by water condensed on the inside of the hoophouse plastic, or weighed down by ice, when the soaked cover freezes at night. This test batch of about 180′ came coiled, in a circle about 2½’ in diameter, and the built in curve is perfect for stretching slightly to span about 4′ of bed. So, no bending required, it’s all about the snipping!
Working around steel
Exactly where it was delivered last fall, the steel for the new hoophouse is kinda in the way, so we’re working around it (it doesn’t look like much in the pic, but it will expand into 30’x108’x16’H of plastic-covered year-round field protection). Beds of brassica greens are already in and protected by row cover from flea beetle attack. Lisa preps beds for more. Spring direct seeding proceeds…
