One side of the hoophouse is full.  In the pic, from front to back are lettuces (Forellenschluss, Black Seeded Simpson, Buttercrunch, and Red Salad Bowl), and scallions (Purplette, Pearl Drop, and Evergreen).  At the end on the left are three trays of lettuces that have just been seeded.  Behind us are 4 trays of broccoli (Tendergreen and Green King), and a few more trays of lettuces that are halfway between the two rounds you can see here.

During the day, the house gets pretty warm, so we ventilate by opening the ends and rolling up the side.  At night, it still gets cold (tending toward high 20’s on most nights).  So we cover the plants with an extra layer, as shown below.  This traps just that little bit of extra warmth that keeps the plants happy.

Well, today is the biggest snowstorm of the season. While I’m glad for the moisture it will bring to our parched ground, I’m also a bit concerned about the new hoophouse. By my measurement, a good 6 or 7 inches of wet snow has fallen by 9:00 AM. That’s quite a bit of weight for the plastic frame of the house. So I’ve already been out twice this morning to clear the snow from the roof.  That’s one decided advantage of working from home.  I’ll be able to get out every couple of hours for 10 minutes to hopefully keep the house standing.  And standing I want to keep it.  While the outside temp is 29, it’s a balmy 45 degrees inside!  And that’s without any heat other than what’s provided passively by the black trash cans filled with water.  The lettuce and broccoli look quite happy tucked into their semi-subterranean home.

The forecast calls for up to 18 inches.  From the inside, it’s rather impressive, but cozy.  I added a 2×4 under the center hoop for extra support.

I say keep the snow coming, and I’ll keep my broom sweeping!

Finally got peppers started.  Like last year, we’re doing only sweet peppers.  We’re also focusing on just three varieties: two that did well last year (Ace and Islander), plus a new one (Revolution).

We start them in teeny tiny soil blocks that are just 3/4″ square.  They like heat to germinate, so the small blocks allow us to start a lot in a small space, maximizing our heating mats.  That probe-looking thing in the second pic is a thermometer.

Soon after they germinate, we’ll move them into 2″ square blocks so they can stretch their feet a little.  Next they’ll go into larger pots, and then finally into the field sometime in late May.

Here’s a look at those scallions that were started 4 weeks ago.  They’re just about ready for a haircut.  I’ve always cut back onions to encourage sturdier leaves, but then I was always growing those for the bulb and not the leaves.  But with these scallions, it’s the leaves that I want.  So cutting them back will be bit of an experiment.  We’ll see how it turns out.

I also started new lettuces and checked in on the most-recently-seeded ones.  In the pics are Buttercrunch and Forellenschluss.

We don’t plant all *that* many seeds, but it’s enough to make any sort of efficiencies appealing.  Even a few trays of 162 cells each can get pretty tedious.  So we did a little research and ended up making a vacuum seeder to speed things up.

The seeder consists of a PVC tube with small nozzles that line up with the cells in the trays.  The tube is connected to a small vacuum that came with an inflatable swimming pool (ah, the advantages of having young kids!).  With the vacuum on, each nozzle picks up one seed from a small trough:

Once each nozzle is loaded with a seed, they are aligned over a cell, and the vacuum is broken by moving a finger off a hole at one end of the PVC tube.  The seeds drop into the cell, and it’s back to the trough for another row.  The tube pictured here is set up to do 9 cells at one time.

It takes a little getting used to the motion, but it does indeed speed things up considerably.  If it’s not obvious by now, suffice it to say, we like tools!

After a year of hard hand labor, we decided that some mechanization would enable us to keep at this endeavor for the long run.  So we ended up purchasing a small compact utility tractor.  It’s not big, but has enough power to handle some tilling and materials moving.  In the picture above, I was using it to disk in a section that had recently been plowed.

Tom of Lone Hawk Farm has graciously offered the use of his rototiller and disk, so our expenses were less than they might have otherwise been.  We’re still working out exactly how best to incorporate this machine into our production system, but it’s already provided quite a bit of value as we’ve been able to start preparing the field in a fraction of the time it took last year.