Category Archives: greenhouses

Chive blossoms

On Saturday I pulled  a monster (4.5″ diameter) leek out of the greenhouse for dinner, and a friend says, my gosh, what did you do to that thing?  Nothing much, just the coddled life in the greenhouse.  So, she said, they’re like the Kobe beef of the vegetable world.  Oh yeah, I say:  I massage my leeks with sake daily.

She was on to something, though.  In point of fact, those greenhouses of ours are taking some getting used to, like all good tools.  My garden and food-preservation life has also needed to adjust.  With effort (mostly in the form of forethought), I will need to do a LOT less canning and freezing this year.  This, incidentally, is not the best news if I consider how much time was spent and how much food was preserved last year.  Well, it’s still good news; it’s just quite a bit of an adjustment.

So, I have had these greenhouses (hoophouses, polytunnels) for a year and a half now.  This is therefore my second spring with them and I now have my first full year of harvesting under my belt.  Like any beginning gardener, I am completely learning, completely figuring out how to manage (in reality, I’m flying by the seat of my pants).  But here it is, early May, and we definitely have had a salad for nearly every dinner for the last year.  We cleaned out the rest of last autumn’s veggies from the greenhouses within the last month.  And recently, we’ve been able to pull new (planted since Feb.) vegetables out of the greenhouses and gardens:  Asian veggies and brassicas mostly, like pak choy and broccoli and napa cabbage, as well as asparagus from outdoors.

This is great!  Preferring fresh produce whenever possible, I can really plan on doing a lot less canning and freezing over the summer.  Yes indeed I will still be chained to the stove for fruit and tomato season, and I’ll still freeze some green beans; for the most part, though, the garden and greenhouse contents need to adjust.  Less cabbage in the root cellar, less sauerkraut, time the fall and winter plantings to add more root crops, stage the production of staples like parsley, carrots, onions, and celery.

It also means I don’t need 70 tomato plants  again.  But the leeks?  Oh yeah:  about 100!

Ah!  The March equinox!  Equal day and night happening for us on March 20th, as well as spring’s putative arrival:  after such a winter, I am so happy this day is here.  The White House breaks ground on their own kitchen garden today.  And our humble greenhouses are both winding down and ramping up on this day.  In the old greenhouse, I have been busily sowing lots of seed and transplanting indoor baby seedlings of onion, leek, broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuce.  Everything is sprouting, everything looks great.

The new greenhouse is a bit of a puzzle to me.  Somehow, it is not as warm as the old one, and while this is not a problem (per se) it has me scratching my head.  Either way, and just like the leeks, it’s time for many of the existing plants to get eaten.  This also marks the end of my general parsimony:  eating up a harvest is necessary (as my stinginess won’t let anything go to waste) and it’s also just plain delicious fun.  SO I thought I would share with you on what’s moving out of the salad bowl and getting main-course status on our plates.

Escarole: This lettuce-like plant is actually a chickory, so it shares its family’s tang and bite.  I do use it in salads (and will continue to do so) but it hates the heat so it will soon mostly end up being quickly sauteed with garlic or–my favorite–served slightly warm with hot bacon drippings on top of it.  Add some huge croutons and a poached egg and that is dinner.

Sugarloaf chickory: This plant has many uses, and often I use it the way you’d use cabbage.  It continued to grow through the coldest days so it is a definite keeper in my eyes.  I used it in lieu of cabbage leaves for cabbage rolls: they’re more stringy but I like their bite.  This is also great sauteed, with a splash of vinegar at the end.

Chard: Unlike the enormous fans of the summer garden, winter greenhouse chard is small and tends to hug the earth, reserving its energy.  Because this is a biennial, I need to hurry up and eat it before it goes to seed.  One of my favorite recipes is a chickpea/chard stew with lots of cumin and cilantro and garlic.  Chard is also great braised and wrapped up in a turnover with some stinky cheese, or braised and used as a filling for crepes.

Carrots: I will never rely on storage carrots again, I think:  having them grow in the greenhouse was both so much easier for nightly harvests and so much more fresh with nearly no nutrients lost.  This is one crop I will be sad to see go.

Kale: The red-leaved Russian kale seems to have been a much happier denizen of the greenhouse this winter; its lacinato (dinosaur, or Tuscan) cousins surely didn’t do so well.  It is such a mild plant too thanks to the cold.  Like all that I have listed here, it too is a biennial and the oldest, largest plant is just about to flower.  Think “broccoli” and you’ll see my plans for these blossoms…

do you see the little spider in her web?

and finally, Sorrel: I have been a happy wanderer with all my plants but when I discovered sorrel at Lucia’s in Minneapolis about 15 years ago I knew I had found a vegetable to call home.  They served it as a lemon-y sauce with some baby potatoes…yum.  Unlike all the above plants listed, this is a perennial.  I moved it down from my Minneapolis garden and have both outdoor and greenhouse plants growing:  it’s a favorite of the chickens, too, so usually the indoor one is the only one I get to use.  It melts to nothing in the pan and the plant melts to nothing in the heat of summer, reappearing in the cool of autumn.

We’ve had a string of nice spring days.  Though this is a balm for the winter-weary soul, the greenhouse gardener in me is in a bit of a panic.  You see, there is such a thing as “too hot for comfort” with the little greenhouse babies.

Happy spinach babies

The upside:  things grow fast!  The downside:  things grow fast!

I do wish this enterprise were as simple as “the greenhouse will simply speed up the growing calendar by two months.”  This is a nearly true statement:  I am able to seed stuff indoors in February that I would be hesitant to seed outdoors in April, but it would be a very odd April indeed if the daytime high was 105*.  If I could somehow bring that high temperature down…life under that plastic would be perfect.  So, up go the roll-up sides, and I throw open the doors:  within an hour the temperatures in both have dropped to a very acceptable 90*F.

The hot days, however, caused my stalwart arugula to bolt into seed.  I pulled the whole row up and made a spicy arugula pesto for St. Patrick’s day, with lots of green onions and garlic and some of last fall’s wild walnuts.  Green food rules, man.

Yes, that’s snow on the outside!

It’s been a (select an adjective) winter this year, which is news to nobody, but its severity has particular relevance for the greenhouse-wannabe gardener.  To you I say:  There is hope, but not much hope was to be found in the past two months.

This sad-looking celery is still actually holding on; I figured it would up and die, so it was a bit of a successful experiment.  I do pick around this plant often; it’s actually quite huge…and I will also let it go to seed this spring.

I have done a fair bit of cleanup and cleaning out of the new (Nov. 2008 ) greenhouse since my last update of it.  Many of the greens have been consumed by the turkeys, geese and us, but more than is usual (that is, maybe 10-15%) became worthless packets of green cellulosic mush.  Seriously gross slimy stuff!  I blame the wet weather we had in the fall…I don’t think the greenhouse ever got a chance to dry up before we put the plastic on.  (Normally, this is a fine thing:  one needn’t water in the winter, you see, if the beds are damp when the hot weather stops.  The greenhouse doesn’t let any of that moisture escape…and there’s my problem in the new greenhouse this winter: the beds were sopping.)  I also believe that larger plants (most of the lettuces were fairly large when the frosts came and stayed) do less well than smaller plants.  It’s too bad I can never tell when the cold is going to come and stay or I would plant small plants accordingly.

The old (Oct. 2007 ) greenhouse was underplanted this winter and many of its beds were allowed a season’s rest.  But the cold has affected this stalwart (high and dry) greenhouse as well, as the seeds I had planted in November and December are as yet no-shows!  Likewise the garlic hasn’t made much of an appearance.  It really must be cold in there, and, checking my records, it is:  it’s not that it’s necessarily colder (both winters experienced 18*F lows) but it hasn’t gotten as hot…the hottest day in there being only 80*F, averaging 50* during the day.  Last winter it was regularly in the 70-90* highs, with a 60* day average range…so this winter, on top of being cold and snowy has been dark and cloudy, too.

Okay, mostly bad news, right?  Well, there are some highlights.  And mostly these highlights are calendar-based:  the earth is tilting, and with that change comes more sun, and with more sun comes warmer greenhouses.  In the interim, we’re all still eating plenty of…salad!

This is the side of the new greenhouse.  Every day I knock at least this much snow off the thing.  Why?  It gets dark in there otherwise!

We had a bit of a break in the constant snow around here, so much so that I’m getting a little used to a daily salad.  (No snow = more light = happy plants.)

Note the muted light in the greenhouse, yet stuff keeps growing.

I also got a new salad spinner.  My last one had had one too many encounters with the hard floor.  This new one is bigger so I have to stop myself from filling it full:  that’d be too much for the three of us.

But you know what?  To my snow-blind eyes, these salad ingredients, even dirt-covered, are SEXY.  Do you not agree?

Brune d’Hiver, oakleaf, Freckles romaine, Amish deer tongue, black-seeded Simpson lettuces with red onion, radicchio, red onion and carrot, with some par-cel cutting celery.

Frozen condensation inside the new greenhouse this morning

It’s that time of year again:  killer frosts at night, cool days.  Last week was mostly in the 70s (entirely global-warming freak-out bizarre) so I do have to tell myself that this weather, actually, is NORMAL.  It is a bit of a change, though.  Morning water-changing chores for the critters are, well, less pleasant.

The greenhouses’ contents are now snuggled under their rowcovers.  I won’t take them off then until next March.  The covers are really lightweight so most plants tolerate being draped with them.  Double coverage like this is what actually makes the greenhouse successful.  It tempers the shock of the nighttime temperature drop:  if it’s, say, 20* outside the greenhouse, it will be 30* inside it and close to 40* under the covers.  The next day, if it’s sunny:  it will be 70* inside and 80* under the covers, even if it only hits the low 40s outside.  A cloudy day won’t swing so wildly and actual ambient temperatures inside the greenhouse won’t be much different from what’s going on outside.

My only duty now in the greenhouses is to harvest.  Luckily I never need to harvest a salad in the a.m.:  the plants under cover look quite droopy and cold.  By early afternoon they’ll have thawed and the water will be coursing through their cells, and by dinnertime they’ll be quite crisp and yummy.

Whew!  We got the plastic on the second greenhouse Saturday.  Finally, the weather cooperated.

Imagine putting a stocking on a 28′ long, 26′ wide leg, and that’s the challenge we faced.  For once there was only a tiny bit of wind, no rain, and decent temperatures, all on the day we planned to finish the project.

We have two roll-up sides but I won’t be installing those until next spring, so I buried the plastic on one side and held it down on the other.  I also laid woodchips on the paths of this and the old greenhouse.  The electric company came by for their quadrennial tree-butchering session this week:  this year they removed one entire tree and only hacked up 6 more in our front yard.  I persuaded them to at least give us the chipped wood and logs.  The timing was pretty good as far as the greenhouse is concerned but the house looks nowhere near as hidden as it did before from the road.  Sigh.

Anyway, I am a bit sore but really gratified.  Let it snow!  We’ll be rich in greenery.

Red sails and Grand Rapids seedlings in the garden path

It’s an odd time for the old greenhouse right now.  Although it’s dipping down nightly to near freezing outside (and thus about 45* inside) it is still awfully warm in there during the day.  The other greenhouse, the one without the plastic on it yet (grumble grumble that’s what we’re doing Saturday so help me) is filled with growing lettuces:  they like it cool.  They even like frost.  If I had transplanted them into the old greenhouse, they’d shoot into flower, it’s still so hot in there during the day.

SO it’s too warm for big seedlings.  I also think it’s too warm for seeds, though I will be making a first planting of arugula and minutina (a type of plantain) this weekend.  I will wait a couple more weeks yet until I do more seeds, mostly of lettuce and spinach.

What have I done in there then?  Well, the peppers are still happy.  The pumpkins are slowly ripening to orange.  And I have done my first plantings of the allium family.  I divided one large clump of bunching onions (scallions) to a new area.  I also sowed a bunch of little sets of the Egyptian walking onions.  I even planted some leek bulbs.  What the heck are leek bulbs?  Well, if you overwinter leeks, they’ll produce flowers for you the next year…a good thing for seed-savers like me.  If  you allow the plant to stay there after harvesting the flower, it will often do two things to hopefully extend its life:  it might produce leek pearls (little leeks growing right off the main leek) or leek bulbs.  Elephant garlic is actually a type of leek that’s prone to bulbing.  Anyway, when I harvested my seed stock leeks, I found quite a few bulbs and a few more pearls attached to the dying parent plants.  I planted the pearls and saved the bulbs until now.

But I am still casting about to find some things to plant in the garden that are not seeds.  Lazy gardening has come in handy once again!  The kid and I found some lettuce babies growing in the path next to the lettuces I had allowed to go to seed.  The babies are tiny (under 2″) but she and I slowly uprooted them Wednesday and transfered them to a waiting garden bed.

New home for the babies

The one thing the greenhouse is at this time of year is hot and dry.  I take advantage of this:  drying beans in buckets, paprika peppers hanging on the back wall, and curing winter squashes to the right.  The bell pepper plants as you can see are still kinda large.

Not that I am running away, or opting out, of the problems of the world, but…the greenhouse cares not about economics, about presidential debates.  So I am quite happy to go in there and throw dirt around.

This weekend I finally (finally!) emptied the old greenhouse of its summer contents.  The one exception was the sweet peppers, as I mentioned before:  they were happy, so they got to stay.  (The monster tomatoes were happy too so obviously I play favorites.)  Other than some newly-planted alliums, the beds are empty.  I figured I needed a small period of empty beds to give the damned voles the message that there is no food here, please go away.  Whether that’ll really work or not is debatable; Little Edie is on the job though and I have about 20 mousetraps set in there just waiting for little rodent feet.

My experiment with undersowing the hot crops with green manure was a rank failure.  Yes, the beans produced and were fruitful, but the clover absolutely hated the hot greenhouse, and who can blame it.  So next summer I will need to assess my choice of green manures and go with somebody who actually appreciates the heat: hairy vetch maybe, or buckwheat.  I might even look into using my usual grass mulch, though I do worry about slugs.  In July-Sept., it might be too hot for them too.

So Sunday I pulled, yanked, cut and cleaned; I spread 1/2″ of compost over every bed, and 2″ dried grass clippings, and then I forked things in.  I watered heavily.  It now sits.

My first greenhouse is now a year old.  The first winter of the greenhouse, I used only 6 of the 9 beds currently in it.  Harvests, then, were precious, and the salad stuff before growth kicked in again in March was positively bonsai in its nipped outer leaves.  Why 6 of 9?  Well, I ran out of time (my usual story) and the 9th bed was my old herb garden, uprooted finally when I found the snakes on Mother’s Day.  By late winter, I had planted beds 7 and 8, and believe me, having even that little digging to do in January and February was so. very. gratifying.  I love this bubble of plastic, I do.

One thing that I realized on Sunday, when I was digging?  I am really looking forward to obsessing over the small scale of these nine-plus-twelve beds of dirt.  Last winter, I got to know every inch of dirt I gardened.  It was quite fun, this shifting of scales.  Most gardeners appreciate the shutoff of the tap that is winter in the northern hemisphere.  Me?  I appreciate the steady drip that is the greenhouses’ contents!

Construction has a way of making me happy.  Can’t say as I have been my usual happy self lately, but…when I observe, or participate in, something being built I am joyful.  Not to say that all construction is happy construction, but most of what I personally do is positive, and future-directed.  I don’t build jails, say, or army barracks.  Or Wal*Wart stores.

Finding a corner:  A squared plus B squared equals C squared

Busy weekend;  we began construction on the new greenhouse.  Yay.  Too bad Tom was sick or it would be up now!  Poor thing.  Pounding head while pounding stakes. 

This doesn’t look like much but…it is.  Eight stakes one side.

This part is actually the hardest part:  getting the ground stakes level and aligned.  All that rain though left our tough clay soil slightly easier to work, thankfully.  Next come the bows and purlins, then a wood base, then the end walls, and then the plastic.  Hopefully before first frost it’ll be enclosed.

Plant me!  (And ignore the weedy paths!)

You know, going on vacation kinda sucks in one and only one way:  the work that you’d otherwise be doing if you stayed  home still needs doing.  I woke up at 4 this morning in a minor panic about all that hasn’t been done.

So, on to the greenhouses.  The one concept one needs to get one’s head around about the winter garden is it’s a harvesting garden, not a growing garden.  I should underline, bold-face, italicize that:  one harvests most of the fall, winter, and early spring.  This means the plants that are in there once it starts getting cold have to be, well, not small!  Thus, my early-morning panic.

Penny, showing off some of the new greenhouse frame:  more work ahead.

You see, I am still growing some tomatoes in the new greenhouse beds, but they’ve gotta go.  These are mostly the paste tomatoes, and yes, they’re still fruiting…though admittedly the plants look mighty sad compared to the beauties growing indoors in the “old” greenhouse.  The lower leaves on these outdoor ones are brown and crumpled, and, in general, just look spent.  Indoors?  I swear they just get taller, and bushier.  Currently it’s a spider web of jury-rigged support twine hanging from the framework in there.  But those tomatoes have gotta go, too, as do the peppers and eggplants; I will give them to the end of September, then they’re compost.  It’s still mighty hot in the greenhouse (100/day, 60/night), so I am a bit scared to plant the usual winter garden suspects (lettuces, mainly, and some kales).

This whole succession-planting thing is a bit of a juggle, I admit that.  I don’t usually drop the ball because I really try to nibble off my tasks daily.  Monday, the first day of school, was such a day.  After dropping the kid off but before I start in on my job, I went to the new greenhouse beds and planted broccoli, kale, oak leaf lettuce and some escarole in one bed.  If I do one bed a day, then hey, in 8 days the remaining beds will be filled!  But, oh yeah, I have to evict another six beds of tomatoes first.  Sigh.  I need to pick up the pace.

I will be kinda glad when tomato season is over.  Tomatoes can be tyrants. And all I will *have* to do daily in a couple of months is harvest some goodies out of the greenhouse for dinner.  Sound good to you?  Me too.