A Porchful of Greenhouses

Forgot to check the temperature this morning, but it was chilly and wet. I think around 49. Showers all morning, breaking in the evening to sun and a few clouds.

So this is what the deck looks like these days.

I had the two smaller greenhouses from last year and added the larger one this year. Surprisingly, it holds less than the small ones, and isn't nearly as sturdy. I don't know if I'll keep it--may just buy two more small ones. We talked about building another greenhouse, but honestly these are so easy to put up and to care for, I think I'd prefer to just have four of them and forget having anything bigger. 

They are all pretty much full, almost all tomatoes and peppers with a few herbs and flowers. All my plants are far behind where they should be, but given this cold, wet spring maybe that's just as well. They'll be ready by June, at least, which for the zone we're in is just fine. Our veggies will just be a little later than usual. At least we have some tomato plants in the ground, bigger ones we bought, and also a few squash and cucumber plants. The kale, beets, spinach, and onions we put in in March are doing okay, although Larry tilled up my carrots. He can't quite grasp the concept of mulch and planting closer together and still wants to keep everything in orderly rows. Maybe one day he'll understand what I want to do. In the meantime, I'll keep working on it. He's a great hand in the garden, so I can't complain.

I've been mostly working on the flowerbeds this week, in between rain. And also the planters. I have a lot of weeding to catch up, but got the stringtrimming done and tonight did the flamethrower to burn up weeds in unwanted places. The gill-over-the-ground is as ever the most obnoxious weed we have, and I will have some work to do once again to get it all pulled. 

But the flowerbeds look amazing. I will try to get photos tomorrow. The iris are ready to burst into bloom and there are many, many buds on them. All the plants look so healthy. So the March fertilizing and all this rain have both probably contributed to that. I will remember to do that early fertilizing with bone meal and blood meal again next year. 

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

A Trip to the Doctor=A Trip to Thrift Shops

We have to make our trips count. If we have to go to town, we try to accomplish several things, not just one. It's a habit for country people; if we need gas for the tractor we're going to wait until we need milk or something else. Then we'll add in a stop at the library and whatever else we can to make the most of the money we're spending on gas. I bet most of you do the same thing.

Yesterday was Larry's regular appointment with the VA doctor in Charleston. I'd stopped at the ReStore, Habitat for Humanity's resale place, on Tuesday evening and found a little gas heater for the greenhouse we'll be building next month. I also noticed a lot of doors and windows--we plan to build this greenhouse using old windows and other salvage and I wanted Larry to look at them with me to see if we could get what we needed for a reasonable price. So that meant I needed to go with him to Charleston (which is 50 miles from here).

He dropped me off at a big thrift shop--and he was gone 2 hours! Do you know what kind of damage I can do in two hours? I combed that place pretty thoroughly, I can tell you. Lots of finds, a couple mistakes (do you ever do that? Something looks great but when you get home you find the chip or the stain or it's not what you thought), but overall it was a worthwhile stop.

When he picked me up we headed to another small church-run shop. There I found some good vintage linens and some vintage dishes (Daisy by Indiana Glass--5 grill plates). Then we headed to ReStore. We looked through windows but then I saw the sliding glass doors. The windows were just too pricey, but the doors--not full doors but individual panels--were just what we needed. We could get 3 foot by 7 foot door panels for $15-20 each. It doesn't take many of those to make a wall of glass. We also bought a good storm door with a sliding screen for the entrance, and an antique interior door for the log cabin room we're building. That door had the neatest hardware, a handle with little flowers all over it and old hammered hinges.

I found a small 9-drawer cabinet for the bathroom (one drawer missing but that makes a nice cubby for all sorts of things) and boxes of decorative tins that I will sell on eBay. I wondered about the tins--they had pallets of them? So what was the story? Did the truck wreck? The boxes were waterstained, so had a warehouse flooded?

There must be some story behind all those tins ending up at the ReStore--as there is a story behind every thing they get. I was enchanted with a fireplace gas heater that I could just see in the room we are building. Larry wasn't as enchanted with it so we came home with it.







When I got home I found inside one of the drawers of the pink cabinet a very pretty cameo and silverplate box. The hinge pin is missing but I'm sure I can fix that.



We ended up with 6 glass panels, the interior door, storm door, and the other things for $137.00. We have all the glass we need for the greenhouse now except for the roof, and just need one more door. The greenhouse will be built against the garage so we only need three sides. Larry is going to build a block foundation for it, then we'll build frames and slide the glass panels in, caulk them along the seams, and trim them with wood so they look good on the outside. The roof will be partly glass, and I'd like to use something that will open for a vent. Still working on that part. For this year the roof may just be plastic sheeting until we find what we want.

We were tired when we came home but we worked on the used washing machine we'd got the night before and after a lot of fiddling around, got the loose part back in place and hooked up the washer. It works like a champ and look new inside and out. I have a lot of wash to catch up on today!

And after all of that, I worked on eBay until after midnight. Yesterday and today are free listing days so I try to take full advantage and get as much listed as possible.  These finds are from earlier in the week and I was cleaning them up last night. Haven't got them listed yet, though, as I concentrated on listing some things I'd had for a while.

As you can imagine, we were late getting up today and I am moving slow. It's a good day for resting, cloudy and drizzling. So I am working on the grant applications, packing a few eBay things and taking the day as it comes, one thing at a time.

I hope you had some good finds yesterday. Be sure to check out Colorado Lady's blog to see what others found!

A few more finds--yes, I do love colored glass :)

Back to grant writing!

Into the Greenhouse

Yesterday was the day to get my little seedlings out of the house and into the greenhouse. I had not yet transplanted them from the starting containers to flats, so that was also a task on the list.
You can see the seedlings not yet in flats; they're the patch of bright green on the bench to the left.


I'm trying to figure out what I did with all the cottage cheese and yogurt containers I saved last summer. I had many, many of them, but can I find them now? Of course not. I walked around and rooted around in almost all our outbuildings with no luck. So for the moment I'm stopped on transplanting until I can either find them or get more containers. I'm about 75% finished, I think. The Early Girl tomatoes are in bigger pots because I want them to move along fast so we get tomatoes as soon as early in the season as possible.

I am really liking this greenhouse. There is plenty of room and it stays very warm during the day. The electric heater I used last night just barely kept the temperature warm enough, so I will be looking for another option for heat, or a bigger electric heater. Larry is checking out our old kerosene heater today to see if it can be used--I'm leery of it because the last time we used it in the greenhouse it smoked and coated everything with black. Not good for the plants. I don't want to go there again.

What are these dead-looking things? These are the geraniums we pulled up last fall and hung upside down in the cellar. some of them seem to have weathered through just fine, and even have some green on them. Others I'm pretty sure are no good at all. But all it will cost me to find out is a little soil, water and time. If the ones that look promising actually do make it, we'll have saved a good bit on new plants. One of them was a survivor from the 2007 garden so this will make its third year.

I did one flat of broccoli, one of Savoy cabbage, and 4 or 5 of tomatoes yesterday. I still have more tomatoes, all of the peppers, and celery and leeks to transplant when I get more containers. I think I'll get some flower seeds started too. Might as well since I have the space in the greenhouse. Do you have any suggestions of flowers I might want to try?

The New Greenhouse

One of the things on today's to-do list: put together the new greenhouse. Usually we build a pole frame and cover it with plastic for a greenhouse. This method has worked just fine for us. But this year I saw a kit online from OutdoorEdge that looked simple, and it would make life a little easier on Larry this spring--he is actually the "we" in building that pole-framed greenhouse.

Pluses: It wasn't expensive. It was easy to put together. It can be taken down and stored for next year. The door and windows are easy to use. It's got a lot of space. It got warm fast! The cover is reinforced plastic and seems to be really tough.

Minuses: the frame is very cheap metal pieces that will probably not last beyond one or two years. It's light--we nearly did a Mary Poppins when the wind caught the cover. It was all I could do to hold it in place while Larry hauled cinderblocks to weight it down. Definitely needs tie-downs or some sort of anchor unless you want a big green kite. I'm still a little worried about it in high winds.

Overall, I think it might work very well. We kept the assembly diagram because we can make the frame ourselves out of plastic plumbing pipe and re-use the plastic cover if the metal frame dies.

We will heat it this year with either a kerosene heater or an electric heater. Larry made some shelves with block and boards so it's ready for my little seedlings. That will be next weekend's project, I hope.

Garden Talk

The seeds are sprouting now--broccoli and Savoy cabbage are first of course. The tomatoes will be next, possibly the celery soon after, then the leeks and bringing up the rear, the peppers. All other seeds will either go into the garden as is, or be started later in the greenhouse.

I found an inexpensive way to start my seeds in the house this year. I saved my yogurt and cottage cheese containers for just this purpose. We poked holes in the bottoms of the containers, filled them with seed starting soil, and zipped them up in baggies. Voila! Miniature greenhouses. So simple and I cannot think why I haven't done this before. Live and learn. I have the containers in pans so I don't ruin my table top when I water them later on--if I need to. They may not even need it before I move them outside to the greenhouse.

I have to laugh every year when I look at the tomato seeds I buy. This year's selections? Lemon Boy, Yellow Pear, Mr. Stripey, Brandywine, Mortgage Lifter, Better Boy, Early Girl, Amish Paste, Sweet 100's, and one or two others I can't recall. I know, I know--overkill. But each one is unique in flavor and use! Which ones can I not grow? That's like asking my mother which of her thirteen children she should have gotten rid of. Not possible.

The greenhouse is still in the box. I bought one online this year from OutdoorEdge, through eBay. What's it like? I don't know yet. I think it's going to be pretty flimsy and I'm worried about how it will hold up in our high winds. But Larry seemed to be finding all sorts of things to do besides build me a new pole greenhouse (last year's was in a bad location and now we use it to house the wood splitter) so I thought I'd give this a try. I'll post pics when we put it up so you can see what it looks like--and how easy/difficult it is to assemble. At $109.00, I figured it might last a couple years anyway, but not much longer.

What else is going on with the gardens:

• Larry hauled 3 loads of ancient manure from our son's barn and spread it on the gardens


• He also burned a pile of brush on one garden--nice addition of potash


• Today he plowed one garden and will plow another tomorrow if the rain holds off


• We've decided to put up electric fence to keep the deer out. Last year they ate more green beans than we did

That's all the garden news for now. What's been going on in your garden?