Dear CSA Members,
Despite the calendar telling me it’s mid-Winter, this week has felt like one of transition. The days are getting longer and it is hard not to notice. It has been much warmer than the past few weeks and even though we’re getting rain just about every other day now, I can’t help but feel like the dead of winter has left us.
Almost all of our summer vegetable seeds have arrived and we’re getting ready to sow the first round of summer veggies into plug trays in our tiny greenhouse. These plug trays are essentially just larger versions of the 6-cell plastic containers you buy flowers in at the hardware store, except they have smaller cells, AKA ‘plugs’, and many more of them per tray. This process is exciting but also a bit nerve-wrecking because the first crops that are going to go into the field are chilies, tomatoes, and eggplant, the crops in Solanaceae, or the nightshade family. We plant a lot of these crops and they all have to be ready as soon as the weather turns warm enough for them to survive out in the open. We plant them in the field first because they typically take a long time to start producing. The reason this is nerve-wrecking is that these Solanaceous crops all have to go through a process called “up-potting”. This means we sow the seeds in 72-cell plug trays inside our greenhouse and when they are ready to outgrow their limited space, we transplant them into larger containers, usually 4×4” pots or one-gallon containers. When the time comes to up-pot and we have over 5,000 one-gallon pots filled with tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. and we won’t have space for them.
In anticipation of this, we began building a new hoop house this week. It is going to serve as a nursery for our vegetable seedlings. It is going to be 15 feet wide by 50 feet long. We are building it ourselves out of UVresistant PVC pipe, wood and plastic greenhouse film. It’s fairly cheap to build, but it will be tough and should last us a long time. As of right now we have the foundation built. I’m pretty anxious to have it finished in time to house our up-potted crops that are going to be sown next week. It shouldn’t take long to finish, but we’re waiting on the materials for it to arrive, so keep your fingers crossed!
All the best, Assistant Farmer Will