Two Feet in the Dirt

The frigid temperatures that settled in over the past month have finally broken and after that steady stream of lows in the teens and single digits, anything above freezing feels like the Caribbean! So it’s been T-shirt weather the last few days with highs jumping up into the 60s. With our work so dependent on the weather, we know to take advantage of good weather when we have it, so we’ve spent the last few days working hard on getting the hoop house fully completed. Mike installed the cranks for the roll-up sides yesterday. These will allow us to roll up about 4.5 feet of the plastic covering to vent the hoop house, allowing for air flow and keeping the inside from getting too warm. And then we’ve been working on the seemingly endless task of installing the door.

It’s pretty darn frustrating that after putting up a 13-foot tall, 960-square-foot structure, the thing we are having the most trouble with is building the 8 x 3.5-foot door! Each day we’re convinced it’s the last one and every day it just doesn’t fit by a hair. Fingers crossed that today will do the trick. But despite still lacking a door, the hoop house is already doing it’s job. While the grass outside remains a grim winter brown, bright-green weeds have already sprouted in the warmth of the hoop house. Fortunately, they’re a shallow-rooted type that will be easy to pull, but even though they are weeds, it’s hard not to appreciate the flash of green in the otherwise colorless world of winter. It almost feels a shame to pull them.

Luckily, we’ve got our own green sprouting in the basement. Rather than build a heated greenhouse to start our seedlings in, we opted for the less expensive approach of growing them in our basement under lights. Eventually, we’ll have up to 60 trays of seedlings down there, but for now, we’ve only have two tiny trays of lettuce plants, the first that will go into the hoop house, and they’ve just begun to germinate. The first seedlings to sprout always feels like a momentous event each year and it’s exciting to see the very tiny beginning of what will hopefully be a season full of many more seeds turning into many more beautiful plants.