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Greenhouse update and garden plans. Jan.1, 2021

To my great surprise, our spinach and carrots continue to be alive and well in our unheated green house. Luckily, the green house does a wonderful job at maintaining moisture in the soil so we probably only watered once since planting. On January 1st however, with again surprisingly warm temperatures, we snuck into the greenhouse and gave them a good drink as the soil was finally starting to dry out some. Not soon after we got a snow storm so it was nice to give them some extra love before temperatures dropped. I’ve been told that it is known for spinach to go dormant this time of year so I expect that’s just what the spinach and carrots are doing. Come February they will start to peak up with growing once the longer daylight days come, resulting in an early spring crop. Yippee! I really do hope this works. Its amazing what kind of fruition comes to light when you take the leap of faith and plant some seeds!

2021 Growing Season

We have successfully gone through our bank of seeds and planned our 2500 sq. ft. garden for this years growing season. We continue to analyze the food we eat and the food we buy to best decide on the most valuable to us crops. Our big focus this year will be tomatoes as always (as we can tomato sauce and soup) however we plan on growing them in such a way that we can yield more from one plant instead of increasing our plant numbers. Onions (last year was our most successful year in onion growing), carrots, broccoli (another great grower), cabbage, beets, vines (squash, cukes), and new to us this year we will be focusing more on peas and beans. Hopefully our extended asparagus patch will do well with our transplants started form seeds. And we plan on focusing on making an acidic bed for our acid loving plants such as blueberries, heather, and juniper.

These seeds are our collection of saved seeds on the farm. In times like Covid19 times, where people have (thankfully) become more interested in growing food it has surprisingly been more difficult to buy seeds. It has restored some of my faith as to why we make the decisions we do. For example buying heirloom seeds over the years to promote successful seed saving. I love saving seeds. And this makes me happy!

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Growing Spinach and Carrots in Novemver in Nova Scotia

My husband and father in-law went to work like two busy bees in a hive at the end of summer to put up a 6×18 green house to cover a large crop of bell and hot peppers before frost damage. Come Remembrance Day and after the peppers were finished (we should have harvested our last haul by first of November (more on that later) we cleaned out all of the dead peppers. The greenhouse was reaching highs of 26C but this was also with unusual warm temps in November as high as 18 degrees after a cold snap just a week or two ago. With the greenhouse now stripped and the soil and air so warm, with loose sandy soil … it only felt right to do our first winter experiment and throw some seeds in the ground! Spinach was a must (as spinach loves cold weather and we havent had a good crop of spinach yet.) I’ve always wanted to do a fall planting and recently learned that it probably was never going to happen without a cold frame or greenhouse. I figure the green house is a high chance of success rate as the warm temperatures may stick around just long enough for germination and then the temperatures will drop just in time for proper spinach growing conditions. Carrots are a real shot in the dark but that only adds to the excitment of anticipation. Carrots also can do well by managing in cooler weathers. If they freeze however they will become rubbery. The real question is how long will the greenhouse keep the ground from freezing? Carrots in a greenhouse seem like they would help prevent the seeds from flying away during germination but without heating the greenhouse I am not sure how long Nova Scotia can accommodate the carrot growing season in the winter. A huge reason why this website was created was to have a place to journal farm related happenings and at the same time allow others to follow along the journey so we can all learn together!

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