A notice that the hydroponic pods will be received tomorrow, sent me on a flurry of activity yesterday and this morning. The Komatsu was pulled from the hydroponic unit and planted in the garden beside the overwintered spinach and covered last night with a plastic bin. This morning the lettuces were removed and potted with hopes of moving it also to the garden after tonight’s temperature drop into the 20s. The unit was scrubbed out thoroughly, refilled with fresh filtered water and fed. Once the pods arrive tomorrow, they will be seeded with two types of tomatoes and two types of hot peppers to get them started.
The local nursery opened yesterday and a stop made to pick up seed starting pellets for the starter trays for other veggies and seed starting medium for the transplant pots as the tomatoes and peppers outgrow the hydroponic unit and before they can go in the garden.
While we were out for our walk today, the wind picked up strongly as the front started moving through, dropping the temperature and clouding the sky. The plastic crate that was my mini greenhouse wasn’t large enough and a stop was made to pick up a larger one or a sheet of plastic to put over the hoops, hoping to get more spinach, Komatsu, and some lettuce and radish seed started in the garden. My search led me to this 3 X 6′ mini greenhouse.
Putting the frame together was easy, it took both of us to get the cover on it in the wind. It was tied to the frame and rocks placed along the inside edge of the cover that folds to the interior. It is still very light and I feared the wind would carry the entire unit away and damage it. To solve that problem, 6 nails were hammered in to the garden box and para cord strung over in three places, hoping to tie it down. If I leave it in this box for the spring to allow greens to grow, the garden plan will have to be altered, but that is okay too. There are two boxes that it will mostly fill, but as some of the greens are already there, it is a good place to leave it. The other box will have peas in it and they will be gone by the time to start the fall greens. I think the greenhouse cover can be removed and the frame covered with row cover to allow cole crops to be grown without cabbage worm damage. With the cover in place, the season can be extended both fall and spring to get more use from our garden.
I’m ready, knowing it is too early to get too deep in the garden yet, winter isn’t over, spring is still teasing us. It will be cold tonight, cooler than today, tomorrow, then warming up for a few days. Next week we will have cooler weather again. The local weather blogger recently posted that March is the only month in the 100 years that weather has been tracked that we have had both a 90 f day and a foot of snow. March is fickle.