Saturday, November 11, 2017
Extending the Season - We're Past the Freeze
We had our first real freeze in the greenhouse today. Temp was 17 °F-37 °F today, with the windchill in the upper teens. I walked in around 10am to find the hoophouses at 45°F and a lot of ice around the place.
These overnight temps were too much for some and right at the edge for most, even under the floating row covers. We have about another week of near freexing lows and then if we don't have more hoophouses, we'll either have to move the plants (i.e. take them home, or the high school greenhouse....) or we'll lose them. It would be a shame to lost the edible flower plants like calendula, and love in the mist; not to mention the dye plants like the indigo and french marigolds!
So far the microgreens are going pretty well. The second round of seeding (where we went with half a 5g scoop per flat) a lot of sprouting! So it took like a week-10 days instead of 3 days for seeds to germinate, but even just under our minimal effort plastic covers, they sprouted well.
The first round of seeding (2 flats from 10/20) were ready to harvest.
The day was all about shoring up the hoophouse benches with more compost and bales and move as many flats of microgreens into the hoophouse. While were on site working today, we also built up some heat with a little greenhouse heater we purchased last year.
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| photo by Scott Patterson |
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By 4pm we were able to get the temp up to nearly 60 °F
Then to move as many microgreen flats as we could, I remembered I had this old (10-12 year old) cheap greenhouse shelving unit that has survived 4 moves and all the winters and all the summers...anyway, its various parts are in various conditions, not sure it could ever be its original self again. So we used the parts to build shelves, allowing us to fit more flats in immediately.
Last thing we left a jug of hot water in the hoophouse to keep the temperature change buffered after sunset.
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