Grow Better Veggies

Manure Compost as Passive Greenhouse Heating

Here is a photo of a big steaming pile of s**t.  Actually, nice fresh stinky horse manure.  I'm going to put it to good use.

In trying to figure out how to keep our greenhouse heating costs down, I thought I'd investigate a couple of ways of increasing the night time temps of the space.  Previously, I blogged about how our greenhouse benches (aka tables) sit on barrels filled with water.  The idea was that the barrels would absorb heat from the sun during the day and exude it at night. 
Then I thought of a way to add a little extra something something.  I looked around the farm and realized that this old orchard box would fit perfectly underneath a bench and inside of the barrels.  Hmmmm, let's get seven more of these boxes.  John, or master composter and our worm-keeper, sprang into action and arranged to bring me enough bins.

Filling the large boxes with fresh manure would start the decomposition process, and heat up.  The mass will give off much-needed warmth for the time it takes to decompose.  Since I'm only heating my greenhouse for a couple of months while I propagate and grow on tomato seedlings, I figure by the time the masses cool off, I won't need the supplemental heat anymore.  At least that's this season's experiment.

Daniel, my excellent volunteer, has been endlessly patient positioning these giant bins in place and moving the manure into them.
We needed as much compression of the manure into the bins as we could get, so we put our newest volunteer, Sarah, to work stomping on it.  I'm glad she took me seriously when I told her to show up with rubber boots.
Once completely topped off with manure, we repositioned the bench tops.  Now they're ready to accept our young plants, help warm up the greenhouse, and definitely exude that fragrant "je ne sais quoi" that will keep people wrinkling their noses a bit upon entering.

Tending Tomato Seedlings

This time of year, we're busy sowing, pricking out, and tending thousands of baby tomato plants, also known as seedlings or starts.  These are for our annual tomato plant sale which begins on March 14. 

Keeping track of and keeping happy over 125 different varieties of tomatoes is difficult.  Right now, we are keeping all the babies in my small greenhouse while our big one is being readied.  We need to bring in every night and take out every morning about 50 flats of starts.  Lisette is on the job taking the flats out into the sunshine.
My heat mat is on the left, with smaller drill flats full of germinating seeds on it.  I keep that mat around 80 degrees, about 5 degrees over the optimal temperature for the tomatoes, and about 5 degrees under for the pepper seeds also germinating there.  Each flat holds 20 "drills" or rows.  I sow about 50 seeds per drill.  Each flat represents close to one thousand plants.
Once the true leaf emerges (the second "set" of greenery), we prick each tiny plant out into its own pot.
Then begins the arduous process of hauling them outside each sunny morning and bringing them in each night to the heated greenhouse.  That's a lot of tomatoes.
We can't wait for the big greenhouse to be retrofit.  This process gets old pretty fast.  But it is the way I've been doing it for a long time.  These babies need babying.  That's why it's called a nursery!

If you want to learn how to get a tiny tomato seed up and growing strong enough to plant out to the garden, consider one of my tomato growing classes.  I've only got two left this season.  You choose varieties from my exotic tomato seed bank of over 125 kinds, and take home a sown flat.  You'll soon be bringing outside and taking back in your own fledgling plants.

January Sprouts

Sunflower and pea sprouts in the small greenhouse.

The temperature of the sprouts and seedlings growing in our greenhouse is carefully controlled using heating pads and a soil thermometer.

The soil thermometer is really an instant-read meat thermometer. It does the job! As you can see, the temp is reading about 60 degrees. That's a bit low for most seeds, but just fine for these pea shoots and sunflower sprouts.  You might be wondering why we've sown them so densely.  That's because chef David Kinch uses the sprouts at Manresa.  We sow trays of sprouts every three weeks, and the chef takes them, soil and all.  It's great fun for me to see our sunflower sprouts adorning something divine at the restaurant.

Big Greenhouse Benches: Water Power!

This past spring we installed a new, larger, greenhouse on the farm. My intention is to have not only plenty of growing room for loads of sprouts the restaurant likes, but to also house the many kinds of vegetables we start from seed here each year.

The shell was erected a few days before our first seedling sale day in mid March. We didn't quite get the benches installed at that time, instead we had to use makeshift tables to hold our thousands and thousands of tomato starts.

Proper greenhouse benches are currently under construction.  Not only are they strong and beautiful, they are energy efficient!

I was brainstorming ways to reduce the energy consumption of a greenhouse (our electricity bill is already horrific) as well as help the environment.  Through my research I discovered a technique that uses stored water to equalize the temperature in a room.

Here's how it works: during the day the water (stored in drums in the greenhouse) heats up. At night it releases the heat, which reduces the amount of night-time heating required. Simple!

I purchased 32 drums, each can hold 55 gallons of water. The drums will be used as the base for the greenhouse benches.

To maximize the bench space, hours of schematic work was done.  They needed to perfectly hold the 17"x17" seedling trays, and customers needed to be able to get to the interiors of the bench easily during sales.  This created tabletops 6 trays long by 4 trays wide, 66" x 100" (with a bit of a overhang). Each bench will rest on 4 drums, and there will be 8 of those benches.

Ron Kinch (chef's dad), who is a retired civil engineer, came over and built the bench frames for us.  He designed a really great frame, keeping costs down, made from Douglas fir 2x4's and 1x2's.  They'll be topped with a durable and cost effective metal screen from the lumberyard.  That's a job for another day (yes, chef, another day soon).

The drums are not filled yet; they will require precision placement because once they are filled they are not moving.  It will be interesting to see just how well the stored heat idea works.  But in the meantime, we are enjoying using the space for our gardening classes, particularly my upcoming series of Winter Vegetable Gardening workshops.