Dropstone Farms

So, network issues at work provided my with a day to research various greenhouse options.

We’ve had such success with the hoophouses that I’m really fired up to get a real greenhouse going in the spring. My first inspiration came from the Westside Gardener whose site is full of Cascadian goodness. Minus incidentals, this is $110 for the frame of a 10′ x 20′ greenhouse. This is awesome. I’m a little concerned about keeping plastic attached in our periodic windstorms and I don’t relish the thought of coming home and finding a springs worth of starts wind damaged. Can’t beat the price though.

What I really want, however, is a shiny, pre-made Solexx greenhouse. I mean, Solexx! It’s got *two* Xs which makes it twice as cool as competing coverings. The deal with solexx is that it’s a semi-rigid double-walled plastic that diffuses sunlight and provides insulation. It’s also fairly expensive at almost $600 to cover a 10×16 greenhouse. It’s got an 8-year warranty though, and I count myself lucky to be able to reuse plastic a second year. Actual greenhouse plastic might last longer though. Plus, solexx wants braces every 16-24″, which means more costs for the frame and more time invested in building the structure.

A third option is clear plastic corrugated panels which cost $30 each. They do have the advantage of being permanent but I haven’t spec’ed out the costs of building a structure robust enough to support a rigid panel that can’t flex in the wind like plastic or Solexx.

My biggest question revolves around whether it makes sense to spring for Solexx? It may be that, in our mild climate, the amount of sunlight is going to limit growth much more than temperature. I’m not planning on heating the greenhouse but I’ll expect to run growlights for seedlings. The other constraint is that I want a semi-portable structure. Lauren and I need to be able to drag the greenhouse around out lot depending on need, soil rotation, and available light. I don’t want to get into anything that would allow justify purchasing one of those tractors I’ve had my eye on.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Requests for starts?

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I had some chicken stories to tell, but there really are other things going on in our lives, which isn’t evident from the past few posts, so I will discuss those other things instead. So here is a list of things I meant to write about when they were current, and didn’t.

• We built 3 raised beds. Spent the hottest weekend of the summer so far hauling dirt across the yard to fill them up. Planted one immediately, with kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, chard. Planted the 2nd one a few weeks later, with a second succession of winter squash, peas, beans, and carrots, as well as new parsnips (which we overlooked before). The third we started planting just this week, with 2 more rows of carrots, some lettuce, and 2 rows of beans. We’ll put more in this weekend.
• We made friends with folks who run the stable down the street and our compost area has grown from one pile to three. One (Ruby’s old haunt) is half-rotted leaves and kitchen scraps. One is horse poo and sawdust from the stable, and grass, and leaf litter from our woods. And the last one is the bad evil weeds I pulled up, mixed in with horse poo, so that it will rot hotly and the weeds will all die and not propagate. Thanks, horse poo!
• We have been haphazardly measuring our garden foods and photographing the meals thereof. I always mean to, but yesterday, for example, I forgot to weigh and photograph dinner with E&K that included a second round of potato and fava bean salad. At some point we’ll get a spreadsheet up and running with harvest dates, weights, etc., so we can figure out what produces best. An initial observation is that the Swedish Peanut potatoes don’t produce nearly as well as the Red Clouds, which are crazy prolific.

All my posts always have lists in them. I like lists, I guess. I’m going to try to have more frequent, shorter, non-listified posts.

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I came home from work early today and put in the ground one caribe potato, three all blues and five swedish peanuts. They went in the ground in a row 18″ apart with ~4 feet^3 of compost and a quart of complete organic fertillizer (COF).

Half of the potatoes I planted in the second week of April are sticking tiny little vines out of the ground. They are very cute. I love potatoes.

We also have approximately 40′ of hoop houses as of Monday as well. They’re so cheap and easy I’ll need to write a post about them at some point.

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This is for archival purposes; sorry for the delay, the listification, and the brevity; more posts, which I hope will be more interesting, coming soon.

All row feet measurements are approximate.

• 14 feet of Mokum carrots
• 10 feet of Merida carrots
• 8 feet of beets
• 16 cauliflower starts from Persephone Farms
• 3 Brussels sprouts plants
• 12 feet of Guardsman onions
• 12 feet of Tropeana Lunga torpedo onions
• 3 newspaper pots full of leek starts
• 9 feet of cabbages
• 3 edamame seeds
• 7 Etna (cranberry beans) seeds
• 9 green bush beans
• 10 feet of green pole beans
• 10 feet of Scarlet Emperor pole beans
• Scattered seeds for: mustard greens; Simpson loose-leaf lettuce; Capistrano romaine lettuce; Sylvetta arugula.

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It was 70° here on Saturday, which is approximately late June weather, rarely in mid-April. It was also the first day of the Bainbridge Island Farmers’ Market, so we rode our bikes into town in the morning and did some shopping. I had my bike all tricked out with my removable wicker basket on the front, and my new REI-dividend-purchased pannier on the back. We strolled around for an hour or so, had lunch at the pub, and returned home with my front basket full of seedlings, pannier full of groceries from the regular store, and Garth’s messenger bag and front basket full of veggies and eggs from the farmers.

When we got home, we immediately took advantage of the heat — seriously, it was actually hot — to bring all manner of poultry outside. Chickens were in the electric fence, until we discovered they could get through the holes of the fence regardless of zapping, so we moved them to a smaller, but still large, area with a smaller-holed. It was pointless, really, as they huddled together in one section for an hour or two, although it was definitely above 70° at that point.

Our charming young next-door neighbor Calvin, who is almost four, inquired with volume and frequency as to the location of the very cute ducklings. So we brought them out to enjoy the sun too, though Calvin was napping by the time we wrangled them outside. Turns out ducklings like a dog-dish full of water and bits of weeds and grass nearly as much as a four-year-old likes ducklings.

The chickens spent their first night in the coop on Saturday, but we didn’t get much else done. Saturday was poultry day, I guess.

And Sunday was planting day. We had bought broccoli, chard, and onion seedlings at the market, and we picked out three kale seedlings from our seed tray. Chard (multicolored) and kale (1 Winterbor and 2 Nero di Toscani, I think) went in between the two rows of peas (Oregon Trail and some Sugar Snap, both of which have germinated almost 100%, which is awesome). The greens should keep sort of shady there, and not bolt too quickly, I think.

Broccoli went sort of alongside the rosemary bush, which we had to trim to get the deer fence in place. I don’t remember which variety it is — the broccoli, that is — but I remember it was from Persephone Farms, so I’ll ask them when we go again this weekend.

The onions are Egyptian walking onions, which are funny looking and awesome. Instead of making a bulb underground and a flower on top, they make a group of small bulblets on top. If you don’t harvest them, the weight gets too much and the stalk bends down to the ground, where the bulblets plant themselves and grow. Hence, walking. The 4-H kid we got them from at the market said they make good scallions, too.

Earlier this week, Garth planted potatoes, too. Rather than marking them with the little flags, he drew a map in his notebook. He says it’s “four plants of everything, and six of All Blues.” I don’t know what “everything” means, but I’ll find out eventually, I’m sure.

As always, pictures are up at Flickr: Chickens; Ducks; Little farm (not very up-to-date).

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