I didn't do my standard Green Gift Roundup after the vacations this yr, due to the fact we failed to offer nearly as many green items as common, other than various secondhand books. But we did get one present that come to be green in more than one experience of the phrase: a greenhouse. No, really! Take a look:
Now that those full-size piles of snow have melted, Brian was able to set it up the day prior to this in the southeast corner of our outside, wherein it's going to get sunlight hours for approximately 1/2 the day. Then he took one of the other Christmas items we were given, an indoor/outside weather station, and set up the
His next step was to set up a folding table in there and set up some of our parsley seedlings on it. Brian always makes it a policy to start extra seeds for every crop we grow in case they don't all germinate, but usually most of them do, so we end up with extra seedlings. So he left the four seedlings that we'll need for the garden inside under our grow light, while setting the others outside to see how they do in a less sheltered environment. His plan is to do the same with all our other seedlings as they come up—leeks, peppers, tomatoes, and so on—and compare the indoor plants with the outdoor ones.
The way I see it, this will be like a less extreme version of the winter sowing experiment we tried a few years back, which didn't prove terribly productive. The winter-sown seeds actually did pretty well compared to the indoor ones, but neither set really thrived, and setting them up outdoors was actually more work than keeping them under the grow lights. But our new seed-starting medium was successful enough last year that I think we've eliminated the stunted seedling problem, and having a permanent greenhouse set up will eliminate the extra work of setting up those mini-greenhouses for the outdoor seedlings. So if they turn out to do as well in the greenhouse environment as their indoor counterparts, then we may actually be able to start them all that way next year and bring our gardening process a little bit closer to nature.
