In December, Tom and I attended a thank-you brunch for doing some fundraising for our daughter’s school.  It was held at a swanky country club in the dunes near us and, as I walked into the bar area to refill my Bloody Mary (brunch, you know) all heads whipped around to see me.

Obviously, Tom was in the bar giving away our farm, one bag of salad and one log of chevre at a time.

“Duuuude,” I hissed.  “You can’t be doing that,” I told him, grabbing him by the elbow and goose-stepping him away from the crowd, after demurring to all the other parents gathered around.  “Don’t you know I have every drop of milk and leaf of green spoken for from here to April?”  I don’t think he really did know:  he’s not involved with either gardening or milking.

“Maybe we just need another greenhouse,” he said.  “I have no problem at all building another greenhouse.”

And this is the 2008 greenhouse, the bigger one:  I planted these salad/root veg things in October.  They’re growing more slowly; they won’t be “peak” until mid-Feb. and then they’ll be “done” in late April, right about when the tomatoes go in and the warm season starts again.

It’s been on my list for a while (a third greenhouse, that is).  And it’s at this time of year that I can see why I most need one, though the greenhouses are the most busy and productive in the warm months.  My reasons for wanting another aren’t to supply the other parents’ refrigerators, though.  They’re more mundane, like, if I had a third greenhouse I could use it to grow worm-free brassicas in the summertime (joy! no Bt, no covers) and I could plant a LOT more garlic and a lot more root veggies.  It’s green greed is all (insert evil laugh).

So in April, we’ll add another.  This one will be 16′x32′.  Stay tuned…

Early spring means late spring in the greenhouses.  And late spring in the greenhouses means it’s probably time to evict the winter residents.  I’m moving through second, third and even fourth harvests from the greenhouse beds while on the way to pulling them up altogether.  I’m feeling a bit of pressure to stop, drop and eat!  It’s time, you see, to transfer the tomatoes and peppers to nursery hot beds.

So, we’re on a green binge.

Especially now that the new push of growth has begun, I look, eagerly, for sprouts and leaves.  And nearly everything is fair game. This is the time of year to eat what you could never find at your grocer’s, or even at a farmer’s market.  Order up!

Self-seeded beets:  1.  fleshy leaves, 2.  the roots are bound for quick lacto-fermented pickles

Kales:  Lacinato 1.  broccoli-like blossoms, 2. leaves, and 3.  peeled stems, great for stir-fry!  and Red (Russian) kale  1.  broccoli-like blossoms, 2. juicy, salad-bound leaves

Kohlrabi:  1.  the root of course but 2. the leaves, like all of the brassica family, are quite edible.

Cabbage: 1. De-headed, I leave some leaves attached to the rooted stem. In a few weeks, I get 2. a leafy second harvest (shown above).

Carrots: 1.  Roots of course but 2.  did you know you can eat the ferny leaves too?

The flowers of arugula and mache now grace some salads

And I am not above eating the roots of plants that are arguably grown for other purposes.  Parsley and celery fit this bill.  They require a bit of scrubbing but they taste just like celeriac, the fat root of the family.

The one thing I cannot stress enough for those of you considering these plastic bubbles is this:  Having one extends your growing season.  In my experience at zone 6, it extends it in two months in each direction.  Four more months of growing things!  Think about your haul if you had four more months in which to grow your goodies.

I grow things year-round in them, of course, like that pretty head of late September-seeded savoy cabbage above.  Through the months of December-February, though, the greenhouses act more like big produce refrigerators than places in which things are actively growing.  But it is at this time of the year, early March, that I have a particular appreciation of them.  You see, late February/early March here means there’s still snow on the ground outside…nary a thing outdoors is “growing,” though there are a few hardy things hiding out there under the snow.  Indoors, however, it might as well be late April/early May.

Everything in the greenhouse, in other words, has hit the Spring button.  Chives and scallions are leaping out of the ground…a great thing, as my chevre loves chives, long missed since their November die-back.  Seeds of the February-planted fava beans and peas are shooting up.  The garlic is 8-9″ tall.  The lettuces, long picked-at and just hanging in there, are now growing madly.  The cabbages are heading faster and faster.  And the arugula, mache (corn salad) and fall-planted kales are at the point of bolting.

Sure, it’s nice to sit in there too…especially if you consider the alternative:

Abandon all gardening hope, ye who enter here

What a winter!  Even though I love this season, this particular one has knocked me off my orbit a bit…and I have been bobbling on, more eccentric than ever.

Time to get my bearings.  I think what was hardest for me this winter was the even more pronounced lack of sun.  Because we’re so close to the lake, we’re usually fairly shrouded in clouds between November and February.  A good and bad thing (good:  it’s so much warmer, bad:  clouds mean precipitation), those clouds.

But the earth is tilting, and as it tilts the clouds retreat.  To help my cloud-induced fugue state I have decided to spend part of my morning the way I spend it in the warm months of the year:  I take my 2nd cup of coffee outside with me to the garden.

Granted, at this time of the year, the snow-covered garden is not terribly interesting.  But the old greenhouse?  It’s a light box, even when cloudy.  Wear the sunglasses, take off your outerwear, grasp that mug in your hands and take a seat.   If only for 10-15 minutes, it really does a body good.

Closeup of that bed:  self-sown mache, Brune d’Hiver lettuce, and curly endive (frisee)

Wednesday was a snow day.  Boringly, that blizzard that hit everywhere hit here too…how could it not?  We’re quite used to snow here (we usually get 80″ per year) and Feb. 2nd’s storm was different mainly because it was paired with a bit of wind, too.  (shrugs) What can you do?

The girl was home from school, and so she and I had lots of time to discuss the meaning of the day, Groundhog Day.  “Gimme some other names for groundhogs,” I said.  “Whistle pigs and woodchucks”  she said, ever reaching for a gold star.  We discussed the older traditions of Imbolc and St. Brigid’s day, especially the notion of winter’s continuance, and how having a sunny day on this day means more winter.  “So the old lady was the Irish woodchuck,” she said.  “I wonder what it was before it was the old lady?”  Ah!  Perceptive child.  All traditions, religious or otherwise, are usually just pauses in the undertow of time. Something will overtake the whistle pig, eventually.

Keep in mind these things are between 9′ and 10′ tall

Recently, however, I have received a ton of questions about my greenhouses.  So I thought I would show you what’s going on in them despite the white stuff outside.  Here’s a bit of a photo journal, taken on Thursday at lunchtime.

Little teensy wrist, huh?  And a waist-high drift standing between me and dinner!

Here:  I have made it in:  and it’s quite toasty inside.  (23* is the worst it’s been indoors all winter.)

But turning around, this is what’s climbing up one side!  It’s quite okay to have snow 5′ or more up the sides, but up and over the top is kinda unusual.

I’ve knocked some of the snow off from the inside, but yeah, I might have to tackle some of it out here too.  Maybe some other day.

But other than the fact that I’ve clipped these lettuces into mere bonsai of their former head-y selves, I haven’t made a dent in the mache.  This is a typical bed.  Dinner!

It’s technically still the beginning of winter for us, and the days and nights will continue to get colder, but there’s a little more sun shining every day.  The greenhouses, however, are still productive.  My challenge?  Pick things fast enough to use things up, but slow enough to allow the lettuces to continue to grow.  This harvesting remains a challenge because I am picking for my family…and four others!  (Everyone in the CSA gets a gallon-sized bag a week.  And we eat what we want, which is probably more like 2-1/2 gallons.)

“Old” greenhouse, looking at 8 of 9 beds:  empty beds have garlic in them

This has been a fairly typical winter for us.  “Typical” includes the 50-degree day of torrential rain we had on New Year’s Eve which thawed every flake of the 8″ of snow on the ground, as well as the regular weather ups and downs…if anything, I would say it’s been cloudier than usual.  Heh.  Climate change = change, all right.  At least the greenhouses nip off the extremes and we’re just left with “winter” in there.

This is a typical mixed bed:  3′x6′, cabbage, kales, lettuce

Trouble?

The lettuces are happy for the most part, snug in their beds.  I do experience the occasional die-off of a plant.  Notice these two in the picture above.  The center has not died on the plants, but the outer, lower leaves have.  It’s been my experience to just leave it and it might recover.  Only when it’s totally mush does it go into the compost.

I can pack things into the beds pretty well too, including things that hate being crowded like these cabbages.  I harvest the outer leaves (that also keeps the growth down) to give to the bunnies…and then occasionally I will eat a whole head.

Hope springs eternal

And those “empty” beds that you saw?  They’re also riddled with seedling lettuces.  Seedling weeds too!  But yeah, lettuces and onions can tolerate really low temperatures and still germinate.  It will just take them a loooonnnng time.

Autumn and winter did a rather jumbled waltz this year (two steps forward, three back, two forward, one back, etc.) and honestly for this gardener my head spun, such were the extent of the wild swings.  Now that we’ve hit a cold snap that appears to have stuck, I admit to wishing the unthinkable:  bring on the snow.  Now that the ground has frozen what’s the use of pretending it isn’t?  Winter! Please come!

Dried beans above and fresh veg below, under cover, 8:30 a.m.  It’s 28*F outside and 51*F in.

Now is the time, too, that the greenhouse beds are covered with their blanket of Reemay (agricultural cloth).  The stuff shrunk in the wash this year, alas; I need to purchase more and either sew another three feet to its ends or drape smaller pieces over the 6′x3′ beds.  Having the beds completely covered, incidentally, is not do-or-die; rather, a fully tented structure should (in principle) retain warmth longer, but it still won’t prevent the nightly freeze to its contents.

Poking out of a now too-short length of cloth, Pac choy, flowering.  One little nip of frost followed by some warm weather causes it to bolt.  Fortunately, it still tastes just wonderful…especially in kimchi.

It’s a good thing we don’t eat salad in the early a.m.  It would be nearly impossible to harvest it then, while frozen.  The heat of the day brings the lettuces “back to life,” and this in itself is a daily moment of wonder.  By supper they’re perky and gorgeous.

But it’s not all salad in the greenhouse beds.   Kales and cabbages hog a lot of space too.  Endive and escarole and radicchio (chickories one and all) span the is-it-salad or is-it-dinner bridge (and I love gratinee’d chickory).  Carrots, parsnips, beets and turnips are grown both indoors and out but somehow are a lot easier to harvest in the greenhouses.  And leeks (perennial and annual), bunching onions, bunching scallions and perennialized garlic (a chive substitute:  unlike chives, the close-planted bulbs’ greens don’t winter-kill) make dinners and salads nice and savory.  Parsley, celery, chervil, cilantro, winter savory, thyme, sage and rosemary add some zest.  And sorrel.  Sorrel deserves a post of its own.

The 80* new greenhouse at 3:00 complete with lettuce eater

This post is to simply demonstrate that, for me, gardening (and in particular harvesting) is a year-round endeavor, and I love it.

Finally:  I got the plastic up on my mom’s greenhouse recently.

I am beginning to question my sanity in late winter.  Really.  It’s usually in March that I crazily, stupidly commit to all sorts of extracurricular projects, of which my mother’s new greenhouse was but one.  Granted of all of them this one taskoid took the least of my time but it hung the heaviest as my mother lives 50 miles away…so it’s not a quick trip to go fix things up for her.  Plus, it’s for my mother, and I said I would do it.

It didn’t help that the greenhouse company shipped us the wrong size of plastic.  Oops.  That was one wasted day.

Drapery, this time with the correct size

Anyway, here it is.  She’s a bit of a fool for tomatoes so we have them fairly crowded in there.  The soil is topsoil carted in from down the road that’s heavily mixed with mushroom compost.  (This is sand we’re building on, after all.)

Using those dipped gloves (clean AND new) really helps get a grip.  This is the hold-down system for the plastic.  It’s a small channel screwed to the two middle hoops into which I fasten this “wiggle wire.”  It helps to have two people do this:  one pulls the plastic, the other wrangling the wire.  But I did it solo, so…  And the two ends have a sandwich of two 1×2 furring strips.  These were left to soak in a tarp for a few days (the better to bend and hold their shape) then I tapped the bottom strips to accept the metal-tapping screws.  The plastic gets stapled to it, the top strips then screwed to the bottom one with wood screws.  Voila.  The top one can be unscrewed then to accept the side plastic this fall.

The deer are voracious and bold here too so I put chicken wire over the two open ends and the area below the roll-up side.  The ends and side will be open until the nights begin to go frosty.  We hope to take down one towering but rather anemic-looking oak in the side yard to give her a lot more sun.

Ta-daaa!  One more thing struck off the list.

Not full power but coming close.  See this post for what it looked like two months ago.

Wet.  Sunny.  Hot.  Wet.  Sunny.  Hot.  There’s not been much that has been unpredictable, weather-wise, in the late spring/early summer around here.

This certainly isn’t anything to complain about.  No, really; the last year we had insane amounts of rain is the last one to which I can directly compare, and I will take this year, thanks.  And I am much happier with the garden’s reaction to this rain now.  My sweat has turned into equity.

You see, in 2007, we had lots of rain.  We’d been here for a year and a half and thus had only two summers’ worth of observation and (more importantly) soil and land improvement under my belt.  I lost a whole flotilla of crops that summer due to the unending drip-drop…everything got hit.  Badly hit.  Drowned roots = dead plants, see; gone were my hopes of complete veg self-sufficiency…that year was my first attempt.  So that fall I trenched and installed perforated drain pipe around the garden (300 or so feet of the stuff, and through clay, too) and I have consistently added more and more vegetative matter to the existing outdoor beds.  It’s helped, a lot.  The plants are healthier and the growing ground is less wet.

Here’s something new:  black garbanzo beans

But a little less rain would help things along!  Every spring, I do actually till two small areas of my garden:  these zones are too big for raised beds but wonderful for the sprawl that is The Winter Squash Vine.  This year, though, no dice.  Can’t till in wet clay, and it never goes longer than two days without rain.  So it looks like I will have to forego another ginormous winter squash harvest…which is just as well considering how unloved that fruit becomes in our household come January.  Likewise, I have seeded the outdoor root crops three times now, which are some truly awful gambling odds.  I don’t like to gamble with my carrots, man!  Luckily, July is around the corner so indoor carrot season is fast approaching.

Purple Peruvian fingerling potato flower

Interestingly, I read a recent article about my extension service’s adoption of greenhouses (high hoops, hoop houses) in my area for…fruit growing.  Really.  This shouldn’t surprise me as I live in The Fruit Belt but I can definitely see the advantage of growing cherry trees under cover here.  Doesn’t that sound…odd?  It makes sense though.  Wet/Sunny/Hot/Repeat means your cherries are going to explode on the branch, their roots are taking up too much water.  Modulate the water, the wind, the bugs, the birds, and the temperature swings and indeed these plastic bubbles will grow fruit just as easily as they grow veg.

Anyway, I look back at 2007 and realize it too was the year we put up our first greenhouse.  With that greenhouse went my worries about weather extremes…and up shot my odds for veg self-sufficiency.  You wanna improve your own odds?

You know what I am going to say, don’t you?

It’s great for drying things, for extending your seed-saving efforts, and of course for many different kinds of veggies and herbs

I’ve come to like this time of year.  Sure; it’s spring and there’s much to love in terms of all the natural and botanical shows going on…the weather is fine, the breezes ruffle the curtains and the mosquitoes are not yet out.  Why in world would I ever have a problem with spring, then?

I think you know the answer:  it’s called PlantItNowItis.

With the Mother’s Day holiday looming, most northern gardeners have task lists as long as their arms, and they’re plenty frazzled.  (Everyone not in the north:  Mother’s Day is the unofficial/official Start Gardening day.)  How many times have YOU lost your planting shovel this year?  (Me: twice.)  But I am somehow less flappable, more sanguine about spring.  I can pick and choose my tasks, with some being of course more front-burner than back-.  What’s my secret?  The season extension offered by the greenhouses, of course.  It’s taken away a lot of my seasonal panic by giving me, frankly, a longer growing season.

(people!  remember, I am a greenhouse/hoophouse evangelist, so…buy my snake oil or not as you see fit!)

Anyway, I have had time to attend to other things, like cleaning OUT the greenhouses of their winter contents and general tidying-up…all tasks that have eluded me on previous May 5ths.

Behold the reconstituted mailbox, for example, and the netting covering the now-open ends of the new greenhouse.  Always, a dry place for gloves, tools and lettuce-bags.

And no tomato hornworms this year, I swear, nor any cabbage butterflies!  (One makes such oaths and it becomes more realistic if one installs netting, you see, as the holes are too big for the adult moths to fly in and lay their eggs on my precious ‘maters and broccoli.)

It’s these little things, and taking (finding, making) time to do them, that make me most grateful.  If I find I have time, then what better place to spend it than puttering around the gardens with my family?  Thanks, greenhouses, for adding to our quality of life as well as our diet.

The base frame:  2x8s.  The skinny bed is the path.

It’s going to take a couple of posts, but I wanted to show you the process of building a greenhouse (hoophouse, polytunnel, etc.) for my mom.  It’s a 10′x12′ complete kit from Growers’ Solution.  We’re doing two major beds in it with one long path down the middle (30″ wide x 12′ long).  This means the beds themselves are fairly deep at 3′-6″.  She understands that weeding will be, literally, a stretch, but she’s not concerned.  She’ll have 84 square feet of space under plastic to grow things, so, what’s a little stretching?

On the fated day, Easter,  that our daughter went into the hospital, I was playing Mother of the Year by actually building my own mother’s greenhouse’s base frame.  (I suppose that makes me Daughter of the Year.)  I used untreated 2×8 members:  short side (where the door is) are 10′ long, long sides and inner beds 12′.  They’re held together with galvanized lag screws with washers that are 3″ x 1/4″.  We assembled it on a flat surface (the driveway) then picked it up and moved it to where my mom wants it.  It wasn’t heavy; two people can lift it easily.

My mom and brother have removed all the grass in the beds.  As a precaution against all the moles tunneling in her sandy soil, they are going to bury some aluminum valley flashing (basically, thin metal) around the inside edges of the beds themselves so the little creatures cannot tunnel in.  It will go down about 6″ below the soil line.

Necessary tool:  hammer drill.  Self-tapping metal screws.  These are the tops of the hoops:  the ends fit into each other.  I put 4 screws in per connection.

Tonight after work I will hammer in the ground posts (galvanized steel tubes that are 2″ in diameter, 30″ long), level them, then put together then assemble the hoop frames.  I will likewise screw the hoops together on a level surface; it’s important to not have things too wonky.  These hoops will go into the ground posts and get screwed into them with metal-tapping galvanized screws.  This hoophouse is so small it only requires a center purlin; hopefully we’ll get that assembled and attached down the center too.

My brother hammers in the posts:  that’s a big bolt and washer they ship to hammer it in.  He’s using a 4 lb mallet.  Then we checked the level between the front and back with a line level.

I always fall down on the photo-taking.  Here we’ve erected the hoops and screwed them into the base poles.  We leveled the hoops by connecting the top purlin to the front and back hoops, made it level, fastened those hoops to their posts then leveled and connected the middle two.

And here’s a shot of how the base frame is connected and how the hoop is connected to the base poles.  I will connect the poles to the base by conduit (C-shaped) clamps.

And here’s the 1 1/2″ c-shaped conduit clamp:  never be afraid to pound something into the shape you need!  This is how I got it to fit in the corner.  I then tapped it back into the base pole.

Tomorrow morning I hope to erect the end walls. These are made of 2x4s; I intend to frame the door at one end and just a simple frame at the other.  (See the post below this one to see my own greenhouse’s end wall.)  The plastic will have to wait until another day!   Mom needs to get the topsoil/compost in place, and woodchips down the center aisle.  Then, it’s planting time.

Here’s another example of hammering something out to suit your needs.  This is a joist hanger/strap anchor.  I wrapped it up and over the top of this 2×4.  That’s the top of the greenhouse, top of the hoop you’re seeing.  I chamfered/birdmouthed the top of the 2×4 to accept the hoop.

And here’s something I didn’t have to monkey with:  it’s the top straps that hold the purlin (straight, horizontal pole) to the curved hoops.

And here’s our lovely ladder model showing the finished end walls.  All this work took only, what, 6 hours of my time!

The green you see is garlic flanking the row

Do you see my brassica family seedlings in this row?  Neither do I.  After a week of not showing up (normally they’re enthusiastic sprouters) I realized I had some problems with my greenhouse-seeding plans.  The problems?  Slugs and pillbugs.

Sigh.  Plan B (planting them indoors) does not mean I will be a week or two behind.  Nah.  It just means I am annoyed.  Planting in the greenhouse between existing garlic rows and then further transplanting the seedlings to their final destinations (outdoors or into other people’s gardens) is generally the easiest way for me to do things.  And I am all about “easy,” especially in springtime.  But with warm spring weather comes warm evenings inside the greenhouses:  prime munching time for the resident mollusks and armadillidiiae.

My lesson for you here?  Do not think “I can’t plant things in greenhouses as they’ll get munched,” instead “I need to watch to see when its okay to plant seeds in my greenhouse (or outside, or wherever).”  Had I planted them a month earlier, they’d have been fine; a month later, I could’ve planted them outside.  In other words, there are windows of opportunity wherever you plant.  The greenhouse offers a lot more windows…but occasionally it doesn’t.

So I will plant all the brassicas someplace bug-free and warm.  Someplace, therefore, where these small things can experience a softer world.

Nothing like a deadline to get one motivated, eh?  Actually, this spring has been nothing BUT deadlines for me, professionally, personally, and garden-wise; throw a new hobby in there (goat milking and husbandry) and guess what?  The blog suffers!  I am sure you’ll forgive me.

Here’s the deadline.  As of two days ago, I finally planted the heat-loving crops (tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, husk cherries, okra) under lights in the basement.  If these were all just for ME, then I could’ve continued my seed-slacker ways, but no.  Many of them are for other people.  I have the school gardens to grow for, and then there’s my mother to consider.

Mom was out this weekend, and when inspecting the greenhouses’ contents, she said to me:  “You’re going to think I am completely crazy.  Please consider what I have to say before you say anything.

I want my own greenhouse.“

To which I of course said HOORAY!  So I ordered her up a 10′x12′ kit from the same outfit where I got both of mine.  I ordered a couple of other things for it over and above the kit, but…come Easter weekend, I should be pounding stakes in the ground in the back yard of her house in the dunes.  I will of course document it to show you how easy it is, even considering how she has no real soil to speak of (maybe 3″ deep).

This woman wants her homegrown tomatoes, tout suite!  Thus, my “rush” to planting.

Onion seedlings sprouting in the greenhouse!   These were planted on Feb. 22nd, so…the germination rate I have found is both better and about the same, speed-wise.  These guys are interplanting a garlic bed.  The whole 3′x6′ bed is full of little sprouts from the onion family.

So now I am asking myself:  how important is it I have my first tomato in mid-July?  Because if I can direct-seed them…

Oh: and here’s a friend I found today amongst a weedy carrot bed:All Hail Bufo Americanus

Early March outside in SW Michigan, late April inside the greenhouses:  once the outdoor temps stay above +35F I will need to vent them during the day

It’s not all goatsgoatsgoats here all the time, though I have to admit that, like starting anything new, there’s quite a learning curve.  Every day I shave time off the milking routine, every day I have more time to shave!  The kids were born at a good time for me to learn, and improve:  it’s getting to be serious gardening season here, and I don’t want to miss too many windows of vegetative opportunity.

Water, water everywhere:  perennial condensation on the inside of the greenhouse plastic

We’re not hurting for water here in my corner of the globe.  Combine normal wet conditions, a shallow water table and clay soil, I hardly ever need to water either outdoors or indoors.  I have notions of hooking up a proper water catchment system one day; it’s fairly low on the priority list, though.  However, at this time of the year with these baking indoor temperatures, I do find the atmospheric moisture is not enough, especially with small seedlings.  Anything with root systems shallower than 5″ will be toast.

The platoon says “we could use more snow in here.”  Oh, and my arugula (behind, right)  is blooming, a sure sign that it’s getting too hot indoors.

So, I resort to my usual hee-haw method of water saving:  melting snow in buckets.  I also recycle the goat’s drinking water.  And, I am quite adept at catching the melting runoff from the gutters of the adjacent buildings.  For all the above, I employ my army of 5-gallon used paint buckets.  I am able to spread around about 10-15 gallons a day on the greenhouse beds if it’s sunny and hot.  It’s a pleasant task during my lunchtime “t-shirt light therapy” sessions!

10 of 12 beds in the “new” greenhouse:  all empty-looking beds have either seedlings, unsprouted seeds, or garlic in them.  Some nights I forget to put the covers back on, but everyone comes through okay the next day.