How about an imperfect greenhouse setup?Of course. Works for me.
I planted tomato seeds yesterday hallucinating over being able to plant very early tomatoes in the former hog log in hot beds.Sounds heavenly. I'm so excited to begin planting I can hardly stand it.
The greenhouse is PVC hoop covered with 6 mil polyethylene that, of course, has to be replaced each year. The idea is to trap heat when it's available and suvive when it's not. On a recent day when it as 52 degrees sunny ouside, it was 92 in the greenhouse.I had no idea the difference was that great--40 degrees!
If the temp is going to get down to 25, I put a plastic painter's drop cloth over the flats, and if it is going to get below 25, I light a kerosene lamp under the tarp.You place the lamp on a stable box or something in the middle of the greenhouse?
I put a 1/2" piece of hardware cloth (rat wire) on the flat and make a depression with a chop stick on every other square on every other row. That gives me something like 190 holes on the standard sized flat 1" apart in all directions. Into those holes I sow onions, kale, leeks, caggage (et al), lettuce, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, turnips, beets, flowers, and herbs. Sometimes sweetcorn and peanuts. When the seedlings emerge and have true leaves, I transplant them to 4 oz or 6 oz cups, Beets and turnips are transplanted directly to beds out of the flats when they are about 1" tall.Sounds like you really fill that flat completely full. Do you recognize the true leaves of all the variety you sow or do you label each and every hole (or row) you've planted?
Also by seeding things like lettuce and kale in the flats, I am not encumbering the growing beds for the first 30 or more days of the growth cycle (counting germination time) so that more successive plantings can be done on the same ground.Please talk about this a bit further. Also, does your kale overwinter and come back next year? We inherited (from the previous owner) a large kale plant that came back every year--until last year. It had a stem about two inches in diameter with shoots off it. Last year it didn't do anything, but we left it alone hoping it might come back yet.
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