A piece of spring every day

[greenstorm]

Building something garden-y into my life every day is good for me. Even if it's just topping up the reservoirs on my aerogardens, some sort of involvement keeps me feeling a little more connected and even-keeled.

Today I overhauled an aerogarden; it was the lettuce one, and the lettuce was bolting. I cut back the overgrown plants, pulled them out of the unit and then out of their baskets; they'll go to the geese. I disassembled the little pump inside the unit to remove all the roots wound through it, wiped and rinsed everything, refilled it, and reseeded new sponges with some cimmarron and australian yellow lettuce and trieste sweet chicory, plus a cutting from my hungarian black pepper plant. I also left one of the original lettuces, cut way back and with the roots cut way back, just to see if it bolts immediately again or what it does.

My tomato aerogarden has sprouted several seeds in each cup so I need to pull a couple of the extras out. It's hard to kill them so I may try putting a couple of the babies in soil.

I need to cut back the aerogarden basil really hard, the sweet basil I can just dry but the thai basil I'm not sure what to do with. I looked up some salads, there seem to be some good cold meat/lime/chili/thai basil ones that look appealing.

Speaking of hydroponics, I'm also thinking about setting up some kratky (basically set-and-forget little-equipment) hydroponics for greens but I haven't made the move yet. I don't love the idea of buying rockwool and netpots for it (everything else can be bits of recycled things) so I'm looking into alternatives.

On the soil end my peppers are doing well, all except the capsicum praetermissum which sprouted germinated but didn't emerge when moved to soil. Most of them have their first or second true leaf, and they got watered with the aerogarden reservoir hydroponic solution which should be good for them. Habaneros are up, 100% germination on my yellow habs -- I got them as part of a blind seed trade so I'm not sure what I'll do with them all but they seem happy. The microdwarf tomatoes are also turning into lovely sturdy plants, and the sweet baby jade are slowly taking up space.

I put together a couple soil pots of cilantro, since the cilantro did poorly when I tried it in the aerogarden. My understanding is, it isn't much of a cut-and-come-again crop so I'll probably be cutting them once, then discarding.

In the meantime the pepper crosses I did dropped their fruits, so I need to try again.

Still need to clear out all the shelves for starting transplants; I also need to figure out how many starts I'll grow, so how many I'll keep and how many I'll sell or donate.

Outside it's been super warm which means everything is ice with not-quite-standing water over it. The snow keeps melting on my roof and dripping down past the window. I could probably start greens in a sealed greenhouse if I had one, and maybe maybe they'd make it through the cold yet to come.

I probably need to chew on whether there's a realistic way for me to afford a proper sealed non-cloth-popup greenhouse, like the ones at https://plantagreenhouses.ca/ . Now that I'm moving my tomato production out of the greenhouse and into the field it's feeling like something that size would be worth playing in, even if it's not a 20' x 50' high tunnel. With the double walls I could even deep-bed animals in there until Feb, then use composting heat to do an early crop of greens. A really heat-efficient geodesic dome or clay-backed greenhouse will still have to wait, but I can probably figure out a happy medium there. Besides, the lean-to greenhouse is slowly falling in on itself as the shed collapses, so it's not so much in the running anymore.

I should probably budget out some options around re-covering the first greenhouse (needs to be done this year or next), dealing with the wood tent (needs re-covering probably this year) which could involve re-covering it as a woodshed or making it into a greenhouse and figuring out a new woodshed, getting a new greenhouse, and knocking down the falling-in shed or redoing its foundation and potentially doing a new lean-to greenhouse against it if it's salvaged.

Ok, not to get drawn too far into the future here: seedlings are growing, it's lovely. Next action is cutting back basil and starting the sage and rosemary seed and maybe thyme seed. Starting a pot of parsley probably wouldn't hurt either.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

in our aquaponics, we've used gravel, scoria (which is locally sourced and readily available; we had it laying around), and we're about to try expanded clay balls. i've been resistant to using rockwool in that application, too, becuase fibers of it would inevitably end up in everything, including the fish. would expanded clay balls work for your hydroponics system? they're the easiest to maintain, of everything we've used.

some local farms use a sealed hoop house inside a sealed high tunnel for 4-season growing. these folks have saleable-size tomato plants in March (the rest of us can't compete!), and i saw images from inside their hoop yesterday - rows of radishes, beets, kale, chard.

[greenstorm]

I'm doing a small-scale indoor thing; the rockwool is just basically to get the seedling big enough to put into the system. I don't think you can start seeds in those clay balls; what do you use for tiny starts? I've seen someone use pool noodles, they cut ribbons out of them and tied the ribbon in a spiral and put the little seedling in the center. The clay balls could certainly hold the little plant into the netpot when it got big enough.

I probably have mentioned this guy before, but Dong Jianyi has a truly impressive setup in Alberta which also gets down to -40C. His system has moving parts: blankets, a snow-removal vibrator. All the moving parts go against my desire not to be fixing machinery all the time; a greenhouse-in-greenhouse setup does seem a little more straightforward. Let me think: it would still need removable insulation here, because the temp just gets so low; I'm not sure about lighting in winter through so much plastic, we barely have any light at all here; and then it still is a bunch of infrastructure. Do your local farms remove the hoop house in summer, is it just a low set of hoops?

[yarrowkat]

i haven't started seeds in the clay balls yet, but i have started seeds in gravel - and it's an outdoor aquaponics system so definitely a different if related animal - lots of things start fine in gravel as long as the water level isn't so high that it floats them into the pond. otherwise i've started things in soil in flats and transplated them after they have 4-6 leaves.

Vida Verde, the folks with the hoophouse inside their high tunnel, are a production CSA, big operation with big fields, multiple high-tunnels, and heavy equipment. they have a deal to help provide local organic produce to the public school system, tho I believe there are other farms in that deal as well. they take the hoop house out of the high tunnel when it's warm enough, and have fans for cooling, and roll-up sides. this is based on seeing their instagram posts for several years.

light isn't a problem here, even in winter; your climate has more constraints requiring more infrastructure. insulation and/or a trombe wall (do those work there?), and maybe battery-operated LEDs tube-lights inside the most-inner plastic layer, on a timer?

[greenstorm]

Trombe wall! I've never heard that term before, but I have seen one in a building in Vancouver-- the inner wall, inside the glass, slowly grew mold over the two years my bus route passed it. I have to poke into it more to see how it works in a greenhouse context, but that's the sort of thing I'd be trying to achieve with essentially a greenhouse with a thick clay berm as the north wall. Eventually I'd like to have a greenhouse like this but it'll take earth moving and research (how does it get handled with so much frost heave?).

One solution I've considered/put pieces together from what I've seen is to have black drums full of water that contain de-icers (like I use for the birds) that keep the water at freezing. That way the drums act as both thermal mass/heat collectors and actual heaters. Then it's just a question of having an airtight-enough greenhouse.

For the most part I'll probably steer clear of lights etc outside, though; I like the idea of breeding for plants that do better in low light more than I like the idea of lighting an area. Of course, who knows what'll happen when I actually end up with a space like this: I am contemplating hydroponics and hot peppers, which I never thought I'd do.

When you transplant from soil flats do you wash the soil off the roots at that point?

Vida Verde sounds roughly on the same scale as Jianyi. It's nice to see schools supplied by someone local like that (I assume local schools?).

[yarrowkat]

o, mold. i hadn't considered that. it's thermal mass in a greenhouse or passive solar home,, often placed actually on the south side, so that it sucks up a ton of sunlight and radiates it gently into the space. since adobe has fantastic thermal mass and poor insulation qualities, so on the north it would still need to be insulated on the outside, and placed so that the sun still strikes it if possible in winter.

the de-icer idea could work! nice almost-passive heating plus a nice big thermal mass. we're using two 8x2 stock tanks in our dome for thermal mass, placed on the north side.

Vida Verde provides produce for the local school system yes. i think specifically elementary schools? but i'm not sure.

[greenstorm]

I mean, everything in Vancouver is moldy. It's a rainforest that never freezes and historically never gets real warm or dries out either, so everything has all year to slowly subside into the earth.

How does it keep from blocking the light? I guess your sun is much higher on the horizon so it goes overtop the wall?

I saw someone with a dome that had an open-topped stock pond that they used both for thermal mass and to water from, I suppose a similar idea. Are they just hanging out in your dome or will they end up aquaponics or something someday?

[yarrowkat]

i feel very fortunate to have very little mold in my life. :) i was in my 30s the first time i visited the PNW and learned that moss can eat a house. i am still alarmed, i'll never trust moss again. ;)

a trombe wall in a greenhouse is ususually 2-3' tall, so the sun shines over it for all but a small section of the floor, and shelving would be placed above it. we don't have one in our little greenhouse - we have 2 long shelves, floor-height and just above that, covered in lidded 5g buckets full of water. we have a friend who buys cat litter that comes in a square yellow plastic bucket, so we've ended up with piles of these buckets just everywhere. they're not useful for *everything* but they're darn useful. so it's not pretty but it works. shelves are over the buckets

the tanks in the dome will be for duckweed and water lilies, the former for a chicken feed supplement and the latter for beauty. :)