Filling the Green House

Filling the Green House is a lot like moving into a new house.  You have to unpack everything and start re-arranging everything to fit.  Throw in transplanting, mulching, keeping everything watered and you can easily walk out to "Just check the plants" in the morning and find yourself ready to fix lunch by the time you walk back in.  Here's the progression of filling the house...

This is the first year we have configured the green house this way and I already love it.  It is actually two 6' X 10' green houses joined on a base of 2' X 12' timbers.  We get the timbers from my husbands' work.  They are used for scaffolding and once they develop cracks, they have to be discarded--our gain.  The tomatoes are potted in kitty litter buckets that we find at our local re-cycle center free.  I like these better than round because they fit closer and save space.  The three gallon pots were purchased used from a commercial greenhouse.  Everything is mulched with oat straw.  I started doing this three years ago and have cut the watering down 50 to 70 percent.  For some of the smaller pots that are difficult to stuff the straw into, I use the chipped brush that we make using our chipper shredder.

Two more jobs to do here--trellis the tomatoes with cables hanging from the rafters and hopefully get a drip irrigation system in place mostly to take care of watering if I'm gone.  I like to fuss too much to not hand water if I can.

Raised Beds

I garden in the back yard.  It's a decent size but I have to share it with two storage sheds, a line of 60 foot tall spruce trees, a few rabbits and three dogs.  Add the challenge of modeling clay for soil and you see the need to get a little creative for space and location.

We built raised beds to eliminate the challenges of rabbits, dogs and clay.  Okay, it also made it really easy to weed as well.  It's nice to go out in the morning with a cup of coffee in one hand and be able to stand upright to weed your strawberries.

These containers have evolved over the past six years and have been moved around the garden to test the best place for the light and space.  It's nice to be able to relocate a fully established 3' X 8' garden bed to another location without ruffling a leaf! 

The biggest change came after a devastating hail storm last year.  In the space of 10 minutes, my beautiful garden looked like a victim of a mass attack by lunatics with butcher knives.  Everything was slashed to shreds.  We set to work the next weekend and came up with this...

The shade cloth deflects heavy rain and hail and a bonus is we've noticed that the plants are less stressed during really hot sunny days with the little bit of shade.  It also helps to keep the birds away from the strawberries although this year, a few have figured it out so we are going to have to put full netting over the strawberry beds.  Forward thinking, we are also in the process of making green house covers for the beds to extend the season. 

Just a note here--you can see through these pictures that I can grow just about anything in the containers in these raised beds.  Admittedly, some plants have done better than others but they do grow.  I will talk more about these containers in a separate post.