Sara's Garden MarketSustainable Living, Gardening, Flowers, and Food

I just wanted to mention a few things about starting your seeds outdoors in the garden this early.

As I have mentioned before, if you have hoop houses you can start your seeds outside this early. Especially with this nice weather we are having!

There is something to keep in mind though – Most seeds need temperatures in the 60’s to 80’s to germinate. If you have plastic over your hoop houses and it is reasonably air-tight you can expect to reach that if the outside temperature is in the 50’s and the sun is shining on your houses. In fact, it might get much hotter than that in there!

If your outside temps are not quite that high yet, I would suggest germinating indoors and then transplanting as soon as the plants get their second leaves. (You could transplant them as soon as they are up, but if you wait a little bit you might have a better survival rate.)

Once the seedlings have germinated and are green above ground you need to really watch that temperature and make sure it doesn’t get too hot and fry your newly germinated seeds!

So – Keep your hoop house warm/hot until the seeds germinate and then just keep it above freezing. Most plants do well in the 45-55 degree range.

I suggest getting a thermometer and watching that temp. You can record and compare the inside temp with the outside temp, and if it is sunny or not and you will have a good idea what temp it is without having to actually check. I keep the front and back of my houses down with bricks so I can remove them and roll the plastic back to vent on hot days. I have the sides stapled down so they are somewhat air-tight.

I recently bought a remote thermometer which I have not set up yet, but I am excited to use it. It has a temperature/weather station you keep inside, it also monitors the low and high and records it for 7 days! It also has a probe which I intend to place outside, then I will get an outside and an inside reading and I can see what’s going on in there without ever having to go outside!

Thanks for stopping by!

The Winter Harvest Handbook, Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses, by Eliot Coleman is a very detailed and exhaustive look at winter greenhouse gardening in zone 5. I am loving the look of the greenhouses on page 64, with snow piled up around the bases of a few large greenhouses!

This book not only talks about traditional greenhouse structures in winter and how to utilize them, but many other alternative ways of gardening in the winter time. Good tips on which vegetables to grow, pest control (different season = different pests!), and garden tools are peppered liberally through out the entire book.

This is an EXCELLENT companion to Carol and Chuck’s Winter Greenhouse book.

I look forward to using both books this Spring/Summer and into next Fall and Winter as I take on the adventure of building and using my own greenhouse in the winter in zone 4/5!

I am so excited because I just read this great book. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to have a permanent greenhouse in zone(s) 4/5. They do use some supplemental heat and a small amount of electricity in the coldest/darkest months. Their greenhouse employs many innovations for keeping it’s cost and carbon footprint to a minimum and returning a yield of winter crops for 18 families in their winter CSA!!!

Watch for future posts where I will be visiting their greenhouse, and making plans to build my own this Spring/Summer!

I’ve been out of touch recently, but I’m back in 2012 with new inspiration!

I have found a few great resources about winter gardening in Minnesota! Can you believe other people are as crazy as I am? 🙂

After my little plastic greenhouse got ripped apart by all the wind we’ve been having this Fall/Winter I was inspired to look into building a permanent structure. I went to my local building store and looked at their shed kits/structures and greenhouse poly/plastic sheeting and corrugated sheet metal and recycled material. It was very exciting and totally do-able.

But NOW; An even better solution has come into focus from a link shared on facebook. (Thank you Lara!!!!) A couple in Minnesota started a solar powered organic winter greenhouse. It grew into a winter CSA which now provides organic veggies to 18 families all winter long!!!

What’s more is that they are very nice, and will support anyone who wants to try to do what they did, AND they wrote a book all about it. What better way to pass this winter than learning how to garden year-round starting this Spring??

The book is titled, Northlands Winter Greenhouse Manual, by Carol Ford.

While searching for this book I also found, The Winter Harvest Handbook, by Eliot Coleman.

Both are about sustainable organic winter greenhouse gardening. Watch for more posts as I read and review these books and start planning my permanent greenhouse project this Spring.

I could not be more excited and I am so grateful that I found these books/resources before I went ahead and started my own pioneering project with this. I will be leaps and bounds ahead of where I would have started out with all this.

Who wants to by in my Winter CSA??? 🙂 (I am only half kidding.)

Parts of Minnesota are under a frost warning tonight.

Here’s what you can do to protect your plants:

• Cover warm weather plants like tomatoes, peppers and squash with bed sheets.
• Water your garden early in the day. You want the plant to be dry when night comes, but you also want the ground to be moist and the plant to be well watered.
• Build a PVC structure and put clear plastic sheeting over it making a greenhouse right over your plants!
• Pot up plants and put inside or in your greenhouse.
• If all other options are not possible harvest every vegetable you can and hope for the best!

I have done 4 of the above. I watered early this morning and all my plants are now dry, and well watered. I spent most of the day making pesto from my basil and freezing it. Basil is especially vulnerable to frost damage. I also harvested every descent sized tomato regardless of color. I make 2 quarts of salsa and froze that too. I potted 2 tomato plants and put them in the greenhouse. I also covered another tomato plant, my eggplant, and one bell pepper plant with bed sheets.

Now all we do is wait and see. It is QUITE cold out there compared to 4 days ago when it was in the 90’s!!

Talk to you in the morning. I would love to hear how everything looked in the morning for you all! Post something in the forum for it.

Sara Murray

Hi everyone,

It’s almost time to start using our greenhouses again. Now is the time to clean it out and gather supplies for the coming winter.

• Wash down the sides carefully and make sure you dry with a fan after.
• Sort all your containers, and see if you need to get more. I usually ask for seedling and small plastic containers from my local free market online.
• Wipe down your shelves
• Gather any new supplies you will need in the coming year, lights, light fixtures, seed bed warmer pads, shade cloths, fans, space heaters, vents, thermometers, humidifiers etc etc etc…
• Repair any tears or small holes
• Make a plan to get your electricity and make it water proof.
• Make sure tie-downs are still good, or repair them.

Happy greenhousing!

Sara

So last year I bought a small greenhouse and I really loved using it for my seeds and plants last Spring. So, now I am starting to think Fall. Our night time temperatures are getting lower and I can sometimes smell a little Fall in the air.

So here’s the next thing I am going to do. When the temperatures really start to plunge and the first frost threat comes I am going to pot up and stake my best tomato plants and put them in the greenhouse to see how long I can get them to keep producing! I might do this with my eggplant I’ve been raving about as well.

I hope they keep going!!! I will let you know how it goes.

Thanks for stopping by

-Sara

The only difference between gardening in the early Spring and gardening in the Fall are the mosquitoes!!

So I cleaned out my raised beds and planted the cold weather vegetables again. The warmer vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, squashes will all need a frost blanket. But the salad greens like spinach, kale, and arugula will all do really well again! Even radishes will get another batch once it gets really cold.

So in May I took the plastic that I had over my raised beds and rolled it off and stored in on the side of each bed. I am guessing I will get another few weeks and then I might have to put it over during the night time hours. I want to keep those salad greens above 45 degrees Fahrenheit. We had one night time temp of 55 last week already!! It went back up, but Minnesota is known for it’s temperature swings.

So, backward we go into Fall and Winter. Thinking about greenhouse, and plastic and frost blankets. 🙂

Tell us what you’re doing this Fall to prepare your garden for the winter in the forum!

Thanks for stopping by,

Sara

So, This year to extend my Spring 2011 season and help my fragile ego recover from my major FAIL at building a greenhouse last fall I decided to get some lumber and build mini garden bed greenhouses.

This entailed me first constructing raised beds that were not off the ground, just allowed me to raise the dirt level and then gave me a sturdy structure to secure my metal clasps to for the plumbing plastic pipes I used for my plastic supports.

I used wood pieces from the value wood pile at my local lumber yard. This is junk lumber, normally cut to about 4-6 feet long with knots, or warped. It’s super cheap! I got some outdoor screws, and metal pipe loops, and flexible plumbers pipe – not PVC, it’s a bit more flexible than that. The name escapes me right now.

To construct the beds I just took boards of the same length, cut one in half and then screwed them all together to make a rectangle. I just screwed right into the long end of some of the boards. To make them last a bit longer I would suggest getting smaller 2×2 pieces to put in the corners to screw into. (That’s for the hoop house 2.0 version!) 🙂 I then decided how tall I wanted the hoop to go, and cut 2-3 pieces of the plumbers pipe to fit that. Then I secured each pipe across the bed using 2 metal loops on each side so that they would also be held upright and not tip front and back. After that I cut some of my greenhouse plastic with enough so that it would go about a half a foot over the ground (extra) on all sides. I used bricks to weight it down when I wanted it on and I was then able to have several options of how open or closed I wanted the beds.

I also secured a hanging thermometer in the middle of each bed so I could easily tell the temperature without opening the house itself. These little beds were about 100 degrees in the sun no matter what the temperature was outside when closed up tight!! I tried to maintain a temperature for the plants at about 55 degrees and that worked out just great!

In these beds I have onions, radishes, salad greens of all kinds, broccoli, and carrots. All cooler weather type things. That way if it was going to snow I wouldn’t have to stress out – and it DID snow on these beds – TWICE!!!

Here are some pictures:

These houses worked out so well that we just had our first harvest of spinach, radishes and arugula the other night as our dinner salad! See the next post that is coming up!

If you have any questions please comment below!!!!

Thanks for stopping by!

Sara Murray

So I finally bought a greenhouse.

Here’s a link to the one I got: http://www.minigreenhousekits.com/5×7-DIY-Greenhouse-Kit

It was VERY easy to put up and it is very sturdy considering it is made of almost 100% plastic! It has metal piping, plastic connectors, plastic outer covering with fabric inside for extra support, and metal shelves that snap onto the shelves after it’s all put together.

It has a vent in the back and the door rolls all the way open. I am still going to need more vents for the height of the summer months. And also a shade of some sort. The manufacturer strongly recommends taking the plastic off in the summer entirely, but I think I can handle it.

It does get EXTREMELY warm in there in the full sun of a 40 degree morning – it can be almost 100 degrees. Let’s hope that translates into at least 55 degrees year round with a small heat source.

It is in my yard in the South East corner at the moment, but I will be moving it up to the deck for the winter. Less area to shovel and a power supply near by make that a necessity in Minnesota! I’ve got BIG plans if it works, and I am pretty confident that it will!!!!

Here are the pictures:

If you have any questions please post below or start a thread in the forum!

Happy Planting!

🙂 – Sara