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

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

Well, in my effort to take tomatoes from seed to table 100% indoors I have created some monster tomato plants! Very tall, about 90% healthy, but no flowers to speak of…yet. Check it out:

These babies (there are 4 large  and one small one that took longer to germinate than the rest) are over 2.5 feet tall. I am not sure if they just seem larger because they are inside rather than out, but they sure are HUGE in my little dining room!

I have been gradually increasing the amount (time) of light they get in a day in an effort to get them to flower, and tonight I will be employing the use of my timer to get them on a consistent schedule. I checked the seed packet and it was not very helpful at all in telling me how tall these plants would be or if they were indeterminate (keep growing taller and have flowers throughout the plant) or determinate (form flowers at the top and stop growing). They seem to have a more condensed cluster at the top of the plant and have slowed down in growth a lot the last few days, so I am going to go with they are determinate plants.

Some valuable information that I got here (University of Ill. Extension) about the salad varieties does point to them having a longer time to flower/harvest than larger more typical types of tomatoes:

Super Sweet 100 (70 days to harvest; 1 inch; red, cherry-sized fruit in large clusters; indeterminate; resistant to VF)

Sweet Million (65 days; 1 inch; red, sweet, crack resistant; large clusters; indeterminate; resistant to FNT)

Yellow Pear (OP) (70 days; 1 inch; clusters of yellow, pear-shaped fruit; indeterminate)

Large Red Cherry (OP) (70 days; 1-1/2 inch; solid, deep red, tasty fruit; indeterminate)

Mountain Belle (65 days; 1 1/4 inch; red, crack resistant, ripens uniformly and holds on the vine; determinate; resistant to VF)

I don’t know what variety(s) I have. The packet just says “Salad Mix.” It looks like I could even have a mix of determinate and indeterminate tomatoes! I chose the salad variety to try out first because with the fruit being smaller I thought maybe the overall plant would be smaller as well. But it turns out that the plants are taller and take longer to fruit than other varieties! Go figure!

So, I am now going to increase their light to 18 hours+ and see if they flower! (Cross your fingers). For my next indoor tomato experiment I will be hunting for a small condensed determinate plant of some sort!!!!

Thanks for stopping by!

~Sara Murray