This Week on the Farm 3/27
It seems like we missed a week updating the website… whoops! The new greenhouse is finally done. It took a lot longer than we thought it would to assemble all of the benches and get them into the greenhouse. We used farrowing crates and the floors in one of the old barns to create our benches.
For those of you who don’t know farm lingo, farrowing crates are where sows deliver their babies. They are put in the crates to prevent the sows from rolling over and crushing the babies and/or occasionally eating them. I never knew that sows would eat their young until I started dating Tyler. I was very disturbed to find that out.
All of the floors and benches had to be pressure washed since they have been sitting in the barn for 15 years. There were three types of floors that we used as bench tops. 
One of the types had very rough, exposed edges that would definitely hurt if you tripped and fell into them/scraped yourself on one. Since we try to follow the safety first motto, we covered the edges with pipe insulators, which are similar to pool noodles. This worked really well and since we zip tied them in place they shouldn’t move at all.
The furnace was installed and we finished wiring the heating and cooling controls. We hung the thermostats in the middle of the greenhouse about a foot above the middle bench. This way each thermostat reads the temperature in the middle of the greenhouse, not next to the exhaust fan or the furnace. It also means that the air temperature that the thermostat reads will be similar to what the plants are experiencing.
All of the plastic on the outside of the greenhouse has been trimmed and the air intake louvers have been covered with a screen. By covering the louvers with a screen we can stop insects from being able to get into the greenhouse. The only thing left to do is to bleach everything in the greenhouse and turn the exhaust fan off. This will allow the greenhouse to heat up and help sterilize everything in the greenhouse. After a day or two of baking in the sun we can open everything up and start putting plants in the greenhouse.
This week we are planting more broccoli and kohlrabi. We are also seeding four types of eggplant and the sweet Carmen pepper. This will also be the first week we seed romaine lettuce in plugs.
We have gotten a lot of questions wondering if we are busy planting outside in the unseasonably warm weather. The answer is actually no. Since we only grow for our CSA members we are tied to a date for when we want things to be ready. We don’t want to plant things one to two months ahead of schedule since the produce would be ready way before we are ready to deliver our first box. We are hoping for a little bit of a cool down so that when we are ready to put cool season veggies in the ground it won’t be too warm for them. 10-20 degrees above average temperatures are very worrisome for us as farmers.