A free Saturday, care of Mother Nature

After much rain outside, the greenhouse just couldn't handle it anymore and flooded.  In fact, one of them was almost a swamp!

And the spinach did not like being flooded.

Kind of like when you overwater plants and they wilt and die, so did the spinach.  On the positive side, we did not have a farmer's market today, giving us a break until the farmer's market starts outside in Clintonville April 29th.  Don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean free time, we've still got lots of preparing to do for the upcoming season.  And with this recent cold weather, we're spending our time adding wood to the fire out in the greenhouse every 3 hours.  Oh how I look forward to spring and warm weather!

So I brought in some forsythia to force it into bloom to brighten my day.

And earlier this week, before the 30 degree weather, the crocuses and daffodils bloomed.

The tulips think it's time for spring!

We found a turnip as big as my head!  That's enough to feed a family for a week, who needs that much turnip?  I see it as a challenge to figure out how many ways I can use turnips!

And there was one field on high ground that was tillable.  The soil was still a little too wet in some spots, but we couldn't resist the itch to plant outside.

Yeah seed starting!

We look forward to these rows filled with lettuce and sunflowers.  Spring here we come!

We get by with a little help from our friends

We just wanted to give some thanks to Steve and Chuck for helping us pot up all the lisianthus we got in.  We ordered them as plugs because they are pretty much impossible to start from seed, and they take forever, but they were just little itty bitty guys.  Unfortunately too, we had 5 trays of 288 plugs which needed to be put into trays that only hold 50 so they can continue to grow even more before they get planted out.  So, let's do the math: that means we potted up 1,440 plugs into 28 trays.  Whew!  Now you see why we couldn't have done it without them!

Well, extreme heat I don't think we are going to have to worry about, but cold maybe.  We're thinking maybe we got them a little too early, but we put a wood burning stove into the seed starting greenhouse so we are hoping they will make it!

This year is our first experimenting with heat and with trying to have flowers this early.  We are shooting for Mother's Day flowers, so wish us luck!

Makes me proud to continue on the tradition of small scale flower farming!

The week of presentations

After being on 10 tv plugging my business and my presentation at the Home and Garden show, I came home, took a nap, and then was off to the show.  Although there were only about 5-6 people that listened to my presentation, the stage manager there said I just picked a bad time to do it and suggested that I come back another year and go earlier in the day.  It was a good place to start though, hearing myself in a microphone was kind of intimidating.  Once I get the 10 tv DVD I will upload it onto here for everyone to see.

Then on Thursday, we went to Keller Farms to talk about how to grow greens in the winter.  It began their Backyard Gardener's Series and was a huge success.  There were more people there than there were seats and they were really excited to hear about it.  And now that the presentations are over, time for finals week for my Columbus State classes, wish me luck!

These make for some fun projects

http://www.maryjanesfarm.org/recipe-project/project-20110221.asp

Our spinach harvest last week... on a bright and sunny day!

Even though it looked like this outside, the sun shone into the greenhouse and really heated it up.

Look at all the beautiful spinach.

It was warm enough in there, I couldn't resist temptation to take my shoes off and stick them in the dirt.  Now don't get me wrong, this didn't last long, the soil was still cold.

Since it was so warm, I had to have some ice cream too.  I figured I might as well take full advantage!

Steve didn't really want to take a break from working to eat ice cream, but I think he enjoyed it anyway.

We're also gearing up to heat our seed starting greenhouse.  Our goal this year is to have flowers by Mother's Day, which requires starting things a little earlier than usual and our basement seed starting area isn't big enough to hold everything we are trying this spring.  

Check it out!

http://www.local-matters.org/story/sunny-meadows-grows-food-flowers-and-community