Latest project complete. Read all about it after these brief messages.
We have just a few shares left for the 2021 season. If you haven’t joined and plan to, now is the time to join. Go to our online store and buy your share!
We are also taking orders for Fruit, Coffee, Mushrooms, Eggs, Flowers and Winter Storage Shares. Order them through our online store.
Unless you are on a payment plan it is time to send in your final payment for your shares if you haven’t already. We don’t typically send out invoices; we just expect members to pay by constantly reminding them in the newsletters. Eventually we get around to asking specific people to pay but typically it gets down to just a few laggards by the start of the season. Anyway, don’t be one of those people or get on a payment plan, whichever works for you!
Our long term forecast for when the season starts is the week of June 14th or June 21st. If we get a prolonged cold spell it could push to the week of June 28th but I’m hoping that does not happen.
We are looking to host our annual potato plant party on Saturday, April 24th from 1:00 until done. As we did last year, it will be a masquerade event. And since we are planting the potatoes outside this year there will be plenty of space to socially distance. Let me know if you can make it. There is plenty of activities for the flexible as well as the less flexible.
Farm News
I’m sure this is true about other professions and businesses but since I farm I figure I’d talk about it with regard to farming. The it I’m speaking of is how as farms mature and farmers grow older they tend to find more ways to be more efficient and less laborious. Mother Nature has a way of making us find easier ways to accomplish tasks. We tend to make a lot of these changes during the off season when time is more available with far fewer activity deadlines. An example of this process is the addition of a new door on the greenhouse. By giving us access to the east side we can save 15 seconds or more every time we go to the greenhouse. It doesn’t sound like a lot but adding it up really adds up. But even more important is that sometimes we save this valuable time while carrying 60 pounds of winter squash. We like the new door.
Another project we just completed yesterday is a connection between the heated greenhouse structure and the unheated cold frame structure. To explain why, I need to give you a bit of an education on growing transplants. At our farm we start our transplants in the heated and sorta cooled environment of the greenhouse. There is a heater that can keep the inside about 50 degrees above the ambient outside air. This is sufficient for our needs since we start the plants in March and it is rarely below 0 in March so we can typically keep the greenhouse around 65 or above. I say sorta cooled in that there is a fan and louvers that bring in outside air when the temperature exceeds the set point, which we set at 85 degrees. So if the temperature outside is higher than 85 there is no cooling.
Once the transplants are getting close to the time for them to be planted outside we need to acclimate them to the harsher outdoor environment. We do this in stages starting with putting them into the cold frame for a few days to a few weeks, then moving them to benches outside the greenhouse for a few days or weeks, then finally transplanting them out in the field. If we don’t do this the plants are likely to die. In the greenhouse they never experience temperatures below 65 and typically not above 85 — at least not in March. The greenhouse also has two layers of plastic which reduces the sunlight to about 86%. So putting the plants directly from the greenhouse to outside is like putting someone surviving a MN winter onto the beach at Waikiki in December. We don’t want to sunburn our plants. By putting them into the cold frame which has only one layer of plastic they get acclimated to both the harsher sunlight and the great temperature range.
If the cold frame is supposed to be cold why are you connecting it to the greenhouse? The idea of using the cold frame is to acclimate the plants to the outdoors. But sometimes the cold frame is too cold and in the past if the temp was approaching 32 degrees I would have to get out of bed, get dressed, go out to the cold frame and move the plants from the cold frame back into the greenhouse. Though it hasn’t happened, there could come a day when I fail to realize it is too cold one night and we lose all the plants in the cold frame to the low temps.
So what we did was put an insulated conduit between the two structures with a fan at the greenhouse end. The fan is controlled by our new greenhouse control system and a temperature sensor in the cold frame. We have the control system start the fan whenever the temperature in the cold frame gets below 40 degrees. We could go a bit lower but with some of these plants being moved just a day or two ago I felt we should keep them a bit warmer for a few nights to let them adjust. The fan runs until the temperature gets to 43 degrees.
With this set-up I believe I can sleep through the night without worrying about the cold frame plants freezing. If we ever get an internet connection on the control system we could have it send me an alert when things are amiss. And if we get really fancy we could build an app om my phone to control the control system. I don’t see that as a time saver yet so it will probably sit on the shelf of inspiration for another few years.
As always, do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, jokes, payments or anything else that may be of interest.