gardens 2010

Well, spring has sprung 

Alright, that is a slight exaggeration but it sure was beautiful today. Manthing worked some on the chicken run renovations and I worked on getting garden plots and crop rotations worked out. A bit of a chore this year since we had the blight last year and now need to rotate both taters and maters out of those areas..

I spent a fair bit of time in the greenhouse rearranging and started on a new raised bed in there. This will give us about 55sf of actual garden space in the gr house but still keep the wood stove in there, just in case.It will also leave my barrels for an aquaponic set up in the future. I took one set of shelving out for seedlings and will move that somewhere else but left the larger shelf unit and my table/storage area in tact. It makes for a bit of fancy footwork in there but gives me near 20 sf of space. It will also alleviate my need for a winter outdoor garden next year and make my life easier.

I brought my broccoli and cabbage starter trays up to the shack and will be starting them up in the loft in the next day or two. I have zero luck with cauliflower, dont like it and so am not going to even bother with trying it this year. I am thinking of taking some of my indoor greens down to the gh and planting them in the raised beds down there so I can free up space in the loft for the rest of the starts that will be started soonly. By doing this I hope to skip that very early spring weather like we will have from now til mid April and be harvesting some really nice veggies by then out of the gh beds. It will also make it so I dont have to have yet another light source to get the seeds going and I wont have to feed the stove in the gh .

Our, or at least my goals this year are to get the beds we have now whipped into good shape, we expanded so much last year beds did not get the proper nutrients. Produce more but make our time spent in the gardens more functional and productive.And my own goal for experimentation purposes is to see how much I can keep growing in the greenhouse through the summer months and see how well certain veggies do in extreme heat