Winter Gardening

I find something satisfactory about receiving 2 feet of snow yesterday and then entering our new greenhouse today only to find all our plants thriving. Outside the temperature was hovering around 29 degrees, but inside the greenhouse this afternoon the temperature was over 70 degrees. This is the first year with our greenhouse in operation. We have been outfitting it to grow an abundance of edible food and remain above freezing without additional heat all during the winter.

To grow food we have a couple of planters that we filled with cold hardy crops. So far we have been eating radishes, salad greens, chard, mountain spinach, broccoli raab, and a few herbs like mint and cilantro. To keep things going we have been starting a bunch of new seeds of kale, lettuce, arugala, mtn. spinach, and more fresh cooking herbs. Soon we will begin starts for the ourdoor garden.

Without extra heat we have been choosing crops that can handle the cooler night time temperatures. But to moderate the extreme cold of the night we have added a few extra features into the greenhouse. First off, the greenhouse is insulated on the east, west, and north sides to buffer the cold and keep the warmth in. In addition to the insulation we have added a lot of thermal mass. The walls have a thick layer of adobe mud over the insulation to heat up during the day and radiate the heat back at night. Along with the adobe walls we have added a lot of water storage: (2) 40 gallon barrels and (4) 20 gallon plastic totes. Together this worked well to passively heat our greenhouse at night, but we found we could still improve upon it.

During the day the temperatures were heating up to over a 100 degrees on a sunny day. So we added a cheap bathroom vent fan connected to a cheap thermostat. Now when the temperature gets over 65 degrees we suck the hot air from the top of the greenhouse through some coils in the 40 gallon water barrels. This acts to both cool the inside temperature and store the heat in the water to be released at night. With the vent system, I have found that the water barrels can heat up to 60-70 degrees on sunny day even when the outside temperature is close to freezing.

Greenhouse, Garlic, and an Unexpected Easter Egg Hunt

The weather has been great this weekend and so Leah and I made some time to work in the garden. We have just planted up the first greens and radishes in the greenhouse. This is our first year trying to grow throughout the winter. We will see how that goes. I will post some info on our passive solar greenhouse setup later.

I love garlic and so today as we do every year at about this time we planted our garlic. We are growing 2 varieties this year: Chesnook Red and one that I can't remember the name of, but it has only 4 cloves to the bulb and is super big and easy to peel which are two qualities I love in garlic. We should have a bumper crop of garlic next June...about 100 or so bulbs.

For the last few months we have been concerned with one of our new hens. We raised her from a chick-hood and she should have been laying eggs beginning in August or September. For months now we have been wondering if something is wrong with her or if somehow we had a feminine rooster, but today while raking up some straw in the chicken yard I noticed an impromptu nest located on top of one our compost piles with 8 bluish-green eggs in it. Finally some eggs. Now if I can only train her to lay in the real nesting boxes.