We have had a few sunny days, so veg in the hoop houses are finally waking up! The lettuce and arugula looks great!
Spring is springing
Rodent-Proof Your Greenhouse: New Year’s Rebuild
We sure know how to celebrate the New Year! We just finished rebuilding our propagation house benches.
Several weeks ago, voles ate nearly 2000 baby veg plants in our propagation green house.
Never again! We rebuilt the heated benches with metal pipe legs that rodents can’t climb and little sheet metal barriers to prevent rodents from jumping aboard.
Here are another 2000 plants newly seeded, including lettuces, spinach, and cilantro. About a month from now they will be ready to transplant into our high tunnel greenhouses.
Summer has finally arrived
We just finished transplanting the last row of our high tunnel with cucumbers. We have 270 tomato plants and 450 cucumber plants, and all them are growing by leaps and bounds now that the weather has finally warmed, after one of the coolest springs in recent history. It will be another couple weeks before we start harvesting these warm weather veg, but in the meantime our self-serve farmstand has bagged salad mix, cabbage, kale, green onions and an assortment of bunched herbs.
Hoophouse Sunrise
We are past the winter solstice. As the days grow longer the growth of the young arugula, spinach and lettuce in High & Dry Farm’s hoop houses speeds up. Spring is still far off, but we can dream.
Winter salad greens
The cucumber and pepper crop in hoophouse #1 was ripped out, and replaced with transplanted spinach, arugula, and romaine lettuce and direct-seeded lettuce for salad mix a couple weeks ago. They are doing well, despite nighttime temperatures of 28 degrees.
Sowing Winter Crops
After it’s summer crop of tomatoes and peppers, the new hoophouse has been seeded for its winter crop of carrots, spinach, and hakurei turnips. This winter crop is always risky business because germination takes weeks and nothing really grows significantly until day length increases to 10 hours, which happens in the middle of February.
Cucumbers reach for the sky, as should we all.
The hoophouses are now in full production. Tyria English cucumbers and Corinto slicing cucumbers are producing fruit at the rate of about 30 lbs per week of each variety.
First Crop of Spring
Here are two varieties of arugula – Esmee on the left and Astro on the right.
The new hoop house begins production
The new hoop house is complete, and it survived the weight of 2′ of wet snow without damage. Although the weather continues to be exceptionally cold (Feb. temperatures have averaged 10 degrees below normal below normal) we have begun transplanting lettuce and hakurei turnip plants. These should be ready for harvest in late April, to be replaced by pepper, eggplant, and tomato plants.
Ode to Wiggle Wire
I just installed the poly film on the new hoophouse. All that remains is to install the rollup device on the sides, and to frame out the door.
