Greenhouse Glimpse

Emerging tulips

With bright clear skies and more daylight each day, inside the greenhouses it is spring.  The tulip beds are very active and getting fuller and greener by the minute.  No heads forming yet, but it will not be long.

Tulip bed

Sweet peas

As soon as we begin to heat the greenhouses for the tulips we fill the beds.  First in were the sweet peas.

RT planting stock seedlings

Stock

Ian planting seedlings

Ian, our new help, got up close and personal with work at Bindweed planting several hundred seedlings.  Welcome aboard Ian!

Planting, Part II

We have planted every square inch of available space in the green house and hoop houses, now the real work begins. A crew of volunteers, good friends willing to crawl around in the dirt, is on standby. After a glorious day of sunshine the soil is still too wet to work but the tension is mounting and the maestro declares we will plant tomorrow morning. I assemble the troops and make cake!

RT, aka the big boss with the hot sauce, drops the plugs in place for proper spacing and we set them in.

Planting in the field is just like planting in the green house except that the plants are much more spread out. RT cultivates each row then lays two rows of underground drip tape. Then we pull a roller over each row compressing the soil just a bit. Running water through the drip lines prior to planting revels each drip and we plant the seedlings accordingly.

Field planting is low dirty work. We are fortunate to have good friends who enjoy being outside crawling around in the dirt. We call it Bindweed yoga, each practitioner develops their own unique postures. RT demonstrates the squat and drop while Carey and Kath practice the one knee planting stance.

Carrie, good friend, talented musician and first year volunteer, demonstrates the two-kneed sideways pose--difficult to maintain, a rookie mistake.

Kath opts for the open leg frog squat, easier to maintain and allows more freedom of movement--truly a seasoned professional.

The rows outside are very long and seem to stretch out forever...
breathe, plant, stretch, breathe, plant, stretch, and move a foot, repeat. This is our planting mantra.
Just focus and breathe (and remember there is cake at the end of the day.)

Namaste

Planting

We have such a short growing window that instead of direct seeding all of our plants we order seedlings in plug trays. This gives us a six week jump on some tender annuals and a good head start for perennials. Our plants need to be seeded and started weeks before we plant and there is a high demand for seedlings each spring so we must make our orders in the fall. Second guessing the weather is the real challenge, we check the long term weather forecast (ha--may as well consult the Tarot deck), look at prior years, pick a shipping date and hope for the best. This year has been a real crap shoot and seedlings have been arriving daily in the pouring rain. UPS and FedEx trucks roll up and down the drive leaving boxes and boxes of plants--seedlings, annuals, perennials and shrubs.

A new shipment of seedlings from Bluebird Nursery.

Upon arrival I unpack the boxes, water the trays and hope for a break in the weather. The forecast is good, but the ground is so saturated we cannot work it.

Unpacking nursery shipments is always exciting--I'm challenged by some of the creative packaging, thrilled with the contents of each box and curious to where it will all go!


Plug trays--plastic trays filled with seedlings packed in finger-sized plugs of soil--watered and waiting to be planted. As you can see by the shadows, we have sunlight!

RT, the maestro, gets creative, re-purposing space in the green house and hoop house for some of the new seedlings. Planting plugs is low work--I crawl, squat and duck-walk down the rows planting seedlings in the support netting. (As the plants grow rows of netting support the stems and prevent the plants from foundering.) Carey, our new wonder woman helper, makes the work go much faster. We start out stiff and chilly but soon the sun has warmed the hoop house and the work goes quickly.

An excellent shot of the support netting, the plug trays and Carey, our new wonder woman!

Carey and I are planting snap dragons. The seedlings are very small and the plugs themselves are only the size of the tip of my finger. They must be pulled gently from the tray and then set into the soil. The snap trays hold 250 seedlings. In no time we have set out planted several trays-whew!