Tag: seedlings

Looking ahead Greenhouse #1

Although the first snowfall has happened here and the days end before 6pm there is a little bit of time left to finish up projects before winter really hits. This autumn we decided to tackle a project we have been putting off for a few months, but with winter coming and the beginning of a small market garden (again) next year it became an important job to tackle...a greenhouse.

As we are on such a small piece of land with so many trees we have very few places to put a greenhouse. There were three spots available:

1. in the pasture; not an option and too far away from the house
2. on the back of the house; we didn't want to get into such a big job yet
3. over the square foot beds; bingo!

Over the square foot beds it was. Now for the hard part. How were we going to build it? We didn't want to just run out and buy wood, although that is what I do much of the time. Tim, being the engineer type he is made sure we had a good model to work from. So he did all the measurements and transferred it all into a digital file that we could look at. It even gave us a list of materials we needed to buy.

This brought up the first dilemma - Do we use recycled materials or buy new. Buying new is easier and faster, but using recycled materials is more environmentally friendly. We talked this over and decided, mainly due to the time pressure of snow falling soon and my reluctance to sit in front of the computer to monitor Kijiji, Freecycle and the like for hours we bought new.

Off we went to the lumber store to get materials to build our 12x12 greenhouse. It wasn't going to be big, but it would have shelves for seedlings and a total of six small beds to start spring greens in. We also wanted to preserve some of the things growing in the square-foot beds a little longer, especially the beets as it seemed the ground was a better place to store them than in our cellar, at least we were going to find out!

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Finally, a website!

I can't beleive it, but its here. All Sorts Acre has a website. Setting this up has been hard due to a new and strnge platform I am getting used to. It isn't pretty so far, but it is here. Thank goodness!! Enough about websites. We would like to thank everyone who bought seedlings from us last weekend at the Rockwood Market on the Green. It was quite a thrill to sell as many as we did. As a start-up smallholding this was a great experience and it was all of you who turned us into bona-fida growers. We sold something we grew for money! We can't wait for the next time. All the seedlings are now outside permanently, unless of course we have a frost. I woke up this morning and immediately looked to see if they all survived. I have heard too many frost horror stories. Thankfully all was good. Our chicks no longer look like fuzzy balls of fluff. they now have feathers and are about a foot high. Their legs and feet still look too big for them but they get around without a problem. yesterday they experienced rain for the first time. They seemed somewhat confused. Today some got left out in the rain and couldn't find their way back in. I had to go out and shoo her towards the door. I love watching chickens. I would have never guessed it was so much fun!