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  • From: "Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: market-farming Starting Seeds
  • Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 18:48:56 -0400


I'm sorry that anybody's having trouble this year. It's my best ever for starts. I had the first set started by a commercial greenhouse (my Fedco seeds, their brand new 512 plug trays and automatic seeder, four weeks in their heated greenhouse). Some of the lettuce sat in its 512s too long and ended up in my own spring salad instead of potted up into six-packs, but that's okay too!

My raised beds are now pretty much like potting soil -- about 50% compost. With row covers to help babies resist the wind they take right off. But this year I've still got a foot of ice and snow on the beds. Gnarf!

Red Sails and Cracoviensis lettuce did absolutely the best for early transplants. Speckled Bibb is still looking puny, Webb's Wonderful and Waldmann's are iffy but they were the ones that sat for an extra week in the 512s when my bursitis slowed the potting-up effort.

At $6 per 512 flat including the flats and soil, it would have cost more for me to park them under lights in the basement for four weeks.

We're going to have fresh sorrel soup by next month and lots of tomatillos by July -- plus plenty of transplants for the nursery. Tomatillos fall over every time somebody looks at them hard, but they pop right up again. And oh, do those little mustards look great in my back porch greenhouse room!

Of course, when I get the electric bill with the heater running all night back there....

In the five-year plan is replacement of the oil furnace with a wood/coal/oil outdoor unit that will heat the 30x90 solar barn greenhouse as well as the farmhouse. For a shorter-term fix, I'm thinking of putting a $300 wall-mounted propane heater on the porch.

All the rest of my lettuce is broadcast straight into the beds. Just couldn't resist these first early bits of greenery.

Well, there are a few perks in this biz.

Dori Green
Ash Grove Community Farm & Center for Sustainable Living
Corning, NY

http://www.ic.org/agrove

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  • Re: market-farming Starting Seeds, Dori Green, 04/03/2001

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