Spring is near! And we are ready with a new greenhouse! Here are some pictures of the plastic going on:

I was on quality control, so I made sure to note that the plastic was going on correctly:

The ribs of the house look really cool:

And the finished product!

Dan rigged up these roll-up sides:

Oops – kids on the scene. Abandoned baby doll. The poor thing spent the night out here all alone.

Kid re-appears on the scene. Reclaims baby doll. Dan designed the front of the house without a framed doorway to be able to open it wide enough for the tractor. Good old fashioned velcro keeps it closed up tightly.

Inside is the fun part. Trays and trays of starts enjoy the warmth.

To give you a glimpse of how we start plants, here’s a little peak at the process. Most plants we start in trays that have 128 cells. We put a seed or two in each cell, depending on what type of plant it is.

Some seeds are painfully small, others quite large. Below are lettuce seeds, pictured with a dime for size reference. I classify them in the medium-size category. Squash seeds would be large. Thyme seeds are teeny. We love this vacuum seeder for this size seed. Blow air out by depressing the green bulb. This creates a vacuum. Put the tiny little pointed end next to a seed and release the bulb slightly, which sucks the seed up to the point. Hold over a cell and release the bulb the rest of the way, and the seed drops right where you want it. This is often done at night, after the kids’ bedtime, in our house. Farming with kids takes creativity sometimes.

Some plants we transplant out into beds in the greenhouse. Some plants will get transplanted out into beds in our fields. Still other plants we will direct-seed in these greenhouse beds. Here is Joren “helping” me transplant lettuce in the greenhouse – a rare shot in which I’m not behind the camera.

The fork isn’t because he’s thinking of a salad already. It’s my tool of choice for removing the little baby plants from those small cells. I then prefer to use a tool called a Dutch H-o-e to create a space for them in the bed and nestle them into their new home. The hyphens aren’t technically part of the name. I include them because a blog post in the past in which I mentioned that tool brought some unwanted visitors to the site who left some rather inappropriate comments. I assure you – this post is only about farming.

Thanks for reading! I’ll have another post soon about field preparations. Doesn’t that sound exciting? (About as exciting as a Dutch H-o-e, you might be thinking to yourself.)