Greenhouse at night

I don’t know if you can see it in the picture above, but the greenhouse might be warming up to itself a bit!

I have had my little greenhouse enclosed since Sunday, and after four days of nice bright sunshine warming the thing up to as high as 90 degrees, there is now a 7.4 degree difference between outdoors and the greenhouse at 11 p.m, several hours after sunset.

Update 7 a.m.: outdoors 29 F, greenhouse 37 F.  I do have 5 gallons of 90 degree water in there, heated by a 200 watt aquarium heater.  Perhaps that explains the difference.

2009 Tentative Garden Layout

8 ft x 6 ft beds.  The lettuce at the top will be planted on/in 20 inch high bales of straw, thanks to a few awesome bloggers who taught me this trick in their posts.

I’m going to do a broccoli experiment this spring.  I’ll plant two whole beds of broccoli, one with a closer spacing than the other, all other things equal, and we’ll see how it affects yield:

I’m guessing the bed with 35 plants will outperform the bed with 24, but it’s worth checking.  Maybe I’ll be surprised.

Basement steps Greenhouse

This is the finished product.  I capped our walk-out basement stairs with a very simple greenhouse made of scrap wood and 3 mil painting dropcloth.  This should help me extend the season a bit.

Just open the door from the laundry room and you’re there.

This afternoon the outdoor high reached 42.  The greenhouse was 81.  It seems promising.  I’m going to start some butter crunch lettuce seeds in the containers on the steps in the pictures.  I just need to figure out what to do about nighttime freezing.  I wonder how much help a 5 gallon bucket of water warmed with an aquarium heater would be?

I made a little greenhouse

I made a little greenhouse of sorts today.  I didn’t get it done before dark…not completely done anyway…so I didn’t take pictures yet.

The lowest level of our house is a walk-out basement about half as far in the ground as a full basement.  As I open the laundry-room back door and walk out the ground outside is at mid-stomach level.

At these stairs, I added a simple 2×3 roof and framework covered with 3 mil plastic.  I haven’t sealed it up tight at all, but tonight it seems to be a few degrees warmer than the rest of the outdoors (33 vs 28 degrees).

Hopefully I’ll add pictures soon.

Seed Research / Garden Planning for 2009

This post is for my own benefit, mostly.  I’m going to make it stick up to the top for a time while I plan.

 

1.5 beds of tomatoes for 2009, 18 good plants.  Start 30, hope for 24 good growers.

 

1 bed (12 plants) for salsa and salads

• 2-3 Early Tomatoes
  • Siletz
• 4-5 Big Tomatoes
  • Delicious
• The rest Disease resistant
  • Still looking

1/2 bed (6 plants) for sauces

• Still looking

 

Going to have two beds of broccoli first thing in the spring.  The beds are 8 feet wide and 6 feet deep.  It’s a bit of a reach to the center, but I’m not going to remake them differently at this point.  Last year I planted both broccoli and cauliflower with the square foot gardening recommendation of one plant per square foot.  Small Miracle claims to grow full sized heads when spaced as close as 8 inches apart.  Coronado Crown claims 6 to 8 inch floret-packed heads with very little center stem.  Early Dividend claims to set “walloping 1 foot heads” (yeah RIGHT) just 45 days after setting out 8-week-old transplants.  Might have to test that theory.

The cauliflower didn’t do well and was pulled out, so the broccoli ended up having a staggered grid pattern of approximately two square feet each.  By June they were so big they were shading out most everything else anyway, so I can’t imagine how it would have worked to have twice as many.

In spring 2009 I’m going to have two beds of early spring broccoli, so I’m going to do an experiment:

• In one 6×8 bed I’ll plant every-other 12 inch square…24 plants in 48 square feet.
• In another 6×8 bed I’ll plant using an approximate 14 inch spacing, giving me 5 rows of 7 plants…35 in 48 square feet.

I’ll compare yields to see if the 24 plants each grow noticeably bigger heads than the 35.  Maybe I should go to the trouble of weighing them?

 

Tomatoes get 4 square feet each, but don’t need the room until June.  First thing in April, plant a continuous perimeter around the full tomato bed of 25 day radishes.  It should be equivalent to a 26 foot row and they shouldn’t be bothered too much by the minimal shade of baby tomato plants.  Maybe even get wild and crazy and plant two rows around, first a row 6-8 inches in, and two weeks later a row at the outermost perimeter.

The Garden is resting

I have almost completely closed down the garden.  There is a bit of lettuce in the left half (as seen here) of bed #4.  Leaves, straw and grass clippings are mulching most of the beds.

The land here is on an incline.  The viewer’s perspective is the lowest point before stepping off into a creek. Beds 5 & 6 are about two or three feet higher up the hill than bed 1.  The creek flooded several times this year, completely covering over beds 1 and 2 and sometimes infiltrating the edges of beds 3 and 4.  That’s not so good for plants.

For the 2009 season:

• Bed 1 will be removed.
• The walls of bed 2 will be raised from 6 inches high to 18 inches high.
• Beds 3 and 4 will be raised from 6 inches high to 12 or 14 inches high, whatever my measurements tell me after I get a water level out there.
• Beds 5 and 6 will be raised a bit too…perhaps 4 or 6 inches higher.
• Beds 7 and 8 will be added farther up towards the house, (creating the issue of there being no bed numbered 1) constructed of 2×6s or 2×8s.

There’s not a whole lot left to do except plan next year.

This shot gives some idea of the gentle south-facing slope.