First Season With a Greenhouse

To be honest, this post had to wait a bit because I feared disaster. Luckily, our first season with a greenhouse has been a near-complete success.

Purchase and Assembly

We purchased a kit from Farmtek. In particular, we got a 9'x12' model shown here. It was not cheap and we added a base that gets attached to the ground by long metal stakes. I highly recommend that, because greenhouses act like sails in a heavy wind. Imagine a $3000 investment blowing across the  yard in a storm, to end up a tangled mass of bent aluminum and cracked poly panels. Buy the base.

The kit requires patience, as well as a few common tools. I used some ratchet-driver wrenches and screwdrivers. Since the poly panels are held against the metal frames with spring-loaded clips, only a fool would not wear goggles when working on that part of the project. A carpenter's square is a must, too, for early work. If the frames are not straight when screwed together, the panels won't fit later, and the builder will need to loosen screws, move things, and lose time in the process.

It took me about 30 hours of work, half of that with a helper, to get the thing built. We started in late winter. Before I began I leveled the area and put several inches of rock dust, then gravel, over weed-block fabric. A few weeds have still found the site comfortable for sprouting, but they have been easy to pull out.

The panels were the most difficult part; screwing together framing is easy, if time-consuming. The panels have open cells to trap air and edges that fit into plastic channels resembling the binding for acetate report covers. The edge-channels got easily mixed up in the bags and we had to unnecessarily cut some down that should have been saved for larger panels.  They are wickedly difficult to slide on at first, but once we had the hang of it, that got easier.

The company provided several tubes of excellent silicon caulk for sealing out air; the metal clips alone for the panels do not suffice when the winter winds blow. And we often start seeds in February. The finished greenhouse had two loads of snow on the roof from late-season storms.

Overall, most things fit well until we got to the roof-vents. They were cheaply made and ill-fitting. I cut down some poplar strips and painted them white. They braced the vents and sealed them fairly well. Water will still drip in during downpours, and one stream ruined a small tray of Ghost-Pepper seedlings that I grow to heat up our Thai Dragon peppers: no small loss if you hate hot food!

I did not have time to install the automatically opening vents that respond to sunlight; when the plants are all in the ground, I will go to work.

Controlling Temperature

Seeds will not germinate when the soil is too cold or hot, too wet or too dry. I found that my Thai Dragon peppers, our cash crop, were particularly finicky. 2015 seed I saved did well, but not Thai seed  left over from last year's bulk purchase, then frozen. 2016 seed purchased as a last-ditch effort to have enough plants did wonderfully. Then some of the Thai-sourced seed from 2015 made a late emergence.

This troublesome seed may be from plants that were not open-pollinated in Thailand. My local plants were. That could affect germination rates, but I think more than anything it was our cold spring. The first sprouts came up in a freakishly warm stretch of days in February, then a really hard freeze. I used to start seeds indoors around Valentine's Day.  I mist the trays of sown seeds and cover the trays with clear tops, cracking them as soon as germination begins. It has worked for 20 years for my basil, without a hitch, and tomatoes too. When the seedlings start to get a couple inches tall, I move them to individual pots, anything from old yogurt cups to reused planing pots.

Bigger growers use heating pads under trays, and I think I will too for peppers next year.

A key element for any greenhouse is a max/min thermometer. It reads those ranges and can be reset daily. One cloudy morning I left the vents and door closed. By noon the sun was beaming down and I raced home to find seedlings wilting. I nearly lost 100+ plants since the greenhouse was at 120 degrees. I got lucky and saved them all, by opening the greenhouse wide and misting everything little and watering the rest. Still, it was a close thing.

Damp Soil But No Floods

Mold will kill your seeds fast. The rule I've heard from professional growers to to mist the soil only when it is dry. On cloudy days, the soil may not dry out completely. On sunny ones, I found myself misting the seedlings again in late afternoon, when I got home from work.

The right mix of soil is everything. I used some planting mixes for some trays. For others I put a few inches of garden soil, from a 20 ton pile we had delivered. I smoothed that layer, added the seeds, then topped it with seed-starter mix to the depth needed by a particular seed (1/4 inch for peppers).

When the seedlings get tall, I just use a common metal watering can and water the lot. I have always liked to keep my potted seedlings in trays with a half-inch or so of water in the bottom. I found this develops really good root systems, as compared to only top-watering the seedlings.

Now we are hardening off the seedlings and planting at a breakneck pace. I think I raised over 1000 plants this year. Yikes. I'm giving away the extras.

Would I do it all again? Absolutely.  I might have looked for a different vent system. When all of our plants are in the ground, I'll unbox the automatic vents I purchased from Farmtek and install them; they respond to daylight and are solar-powered.

And, I did say "Buy the Base," right? And stake it down, right? Here's what happened to Scottish greenhouse, an image I found online, in a big Scottish gust. I'd need more than a wee dram if I came outside and found that.

Old-School Tools: Fire & Fuel

In working on Project M last year, I had to rebuild a carburetor, a one-barrel Marvel. I did it twice, in fact, after messing up the first time around. For once I did not curse, because the job was so simple. There were two little adjustment screws to manipulate whenever the tractor ran poorly. I tune the tractor frequently now, and the 1950 John Deere mows grass like a new tractor.

Enter a Quadrajet four-barrel in my wife's '68 Chevy C-10. The truck gets driven about 1000 miles per year, but in winter it sits a lot. So when we took the truck out the other day on a mission to pick up some 93-octane non-ethanol fuel, the vehicle "stumbled" at high speed, surging as if the engine were being starved for fuel.

"Uh-oh," thought I. We've had the Chevy since 2003, and that particular curse had never afflicted it. In fact, it never has had any problems.

Safely home with the gas, I began to do some research. It looked as though two things might be at fault: the carb needed tuning or the gas tank had some water in the bottom. That can happen even in a nearly full tank that sits in our changeable weather.  Fool that I am, I ignored Occam's Razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is probably the place to begin, and starting reading about tuning carburetors. Time to earn some gearhead points, since I'm writing a bit for Hemmings Motor News.

Spoiler alert: I got it right the first time. I must credit Super Chevy's Web site, where there are easy-to-follow instructions for the three main types of carbs. I purchased a vacuum gauge and as I do when cooking a new dish, I followed the instructions to the letter.  Soon I had a truck that idled with maximum vacuum pressure at 850 RPM, the guidelines for four-barrel carbs.  Then I took it on the road.

image credit: Super Chevy

It stumbled again. I made a round-trip drive of 20 miles, and on the way home, the truck ran perfectly with better power than it had before.  I began (finally) to employ Occam's Razor.

As a brother-in-law once explained, with old motors before sensors and computers, two things affect running or not: getting spark and getting fuel. Spark and fuel sound rather primordial to me. It's amazing that a vehicle as new as our 68 truck, or for that matter, my 74 Buick Apollo have more in common with my 1950 tractor than my Mini Cooper.  But that's how it worked for decades and decades of internal combustion.

I'd assured myself, then, that the truck was getting ample fuel; the carb was well tuned and clean. The gas was new. The electrical system was delivering spark; the motor never missed.

Thus is was back to the bottom of the gas tank, a place I could never go with human eyes. What to do, so the motor gets the RIGHT fuel?  For those using old equipment, water is always a threat, but there are products like HEET that absorb water and safely burn in the cylinders. That's my next step, and since all three of our old vehicles have high-output GM 350 motors with four-barrel carbs, HEET and a bit of tuning will be part of my old-school rituals from now on.

The Illusion Is Real To Me

This post began with some musings at Wagner James "Hamlet" Au's blog, New World Notes. Au has also covered the utopians and skeptics of virtual reality in a piece at Wired, "VR Will Make Life Better--Or Just Be an Opiate For the Masses." Some proponents of the Occulus Rift 3D viewer are claiming that a virtual world good enough is as good at the life we lead without goggles and a fast internet connection.

Since this issue involves both of my blogs, I hope readers will excuse the cross-postings. I have also been thinking about how Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is very much invested in Occulus tech and why the picture of him, striding among a crowd wearing Rifts, chills me to the bone.

Here was my reply at New World Notes.

Even a happy virtual life would neglect the agons of a happy real one.

Yesterday I labored a few hours on a farm tractor I'm selling, checking for issues and eliminating possibilities in the electric system. I used a lot of stored knowledge in the wetware of my brain to trouble-shoot. I was in a place without reliable wireless, so double-checking hunches with the phone was not possible.

Then I went to work on the fuel system, turning wrenches and skinning knuckles until I had the likely culprit. At night I went online, into a flat virtual community, to check my assumptions. This weekend I'll clean out the fuel tank, blow compressed air through all the fittings, and restart the old diesel.

Simulating all that with an Occulus might eventually be possible. Doing so might even feed me if my virtual farm supplied RL (real life) income. But you know what?

Virtual is still FAKE. Always will be until someone really does achieve the Singularity. Hence my consideration of SL (Second Life) and more advanced forms of virtual worlds as just something nice for entertainment, like a novel or film but more immersive.

As for the possibility that our RL world is a Matrix? Let me quote a famous fake person, Conan the Barbarian. I only slay groundhogs and cold beers, but the rest is apt:

"I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."

Don't Hit Me With Them Negative Waves

 

I would be a rich man if I had $20 for every time someone told me "you will never enjoy that" or "that will never work."  

While keeping my my first principles stated here at Tractorpunk in 2013, to remain positive and "light on snark," I do want to cite a few instances of "negative waves" shot my way over the years. 

• You will hate living in the country
• You have to grow up farming in order to do well at it
• Small farms have no future
• You are too old to learn how to do mechanical work
• No one cares about the origin of their food. They just look at the price
• You will never find friends in the country
• You cannot live sustainably any more
• In three months, you'll hate that old pickup truck you just bought
• Organic food is a fad
• You will never be able to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart.

I married a very positive woman. She smiles at these predictions when I snarl. So to you negativists, I say "have a little faith, baby."

Snowstorm in The Country

I had the bad luck to be on a suburban commercial six-lane the night before our big storm of the winter hit. The traffic around the grocery stores was hellish. Even the day before, when I did a little shopping, I found nearly no milk or bread at two stores I regularly visit.

Being well-stocked on both, I just shrugged. I did, however, snag fatayer, lavash pita, and some kibbie at my Mediterranean grocer. One can never be too prepared for a Southern blizzard, a rare-enough event to make folks get a little crazy.  I got in my usual quips in person and online about my favored season to folks who'd just as soon have our state's climate resemble Florida's.

Not me. For a day or two, I can revel in weather that is not all about making us feel comfortable, weather that shows us the universe is not about us and cares little for us, yet is pure and lovely in that indifference. The snow began after 9am, about the time I put up my wife's car in the garage and helped her get a little shelter ready for our flock of pullets, just beside the little coop the four of them use. The older hens, who are just beginning to mingle with the new girls, have a fancy shelter we built  last year, but they are not the sort to be sharing.

As I write this I think we have about 8 to 9 inches on the ground, not bad for 13 hours of snowfall with many more hours of snow on the way. Weather sites online were full of photos like this one I snagged from weather.com, of stores practically looted by folks who would only be in their houses, at best, for a day or two. A month ago, shelf-pegs at our locally owned hardware store were groaning with unsold snow shovels. The temperature then was in the 70s. Now I'm betting those cheap shovels have sold out.

The differences in city and country behavior have taught me a lot, every time it snows. We do not loot the stores here, and drivers generally know how and when to employ four-wheel drive. I try to fit in, but I had lessons long before I moved out to the sticks. Most of my life I was a city boy, but my dad, who was never handy in other ways, always had a knack for being prepared. He was the only man on our block who found decent drinking water during Hurricane Camille in 1969, when Richmond had no potable water for weeks and the Army brought in tanker trucks of foul-tasting stuff. Dad said he never wanted a shovel that would break, so he bought two excellent shovels I still own, 35 years later. I repainted them this summer and rubbed Danish oil into the handles.

My own preparations began a few days ago, getting our last big unsplit logs into the barn to dry out a bit, moving split and seasoned wood up the porch, and putting finishing touches on a greenhouse where I'll start plants for our LLC in just a few weeks.  I ran a last load of wood up to the porch in the first snow, checked our root shelter for mice--we've bagged three since my last post--and tidied up the house while watching the wonder outside.

Partly I do these chores to focus me. I think that is why the ritual of looting the supermarket happens, too. It might be too much, emotionally, to think about what Nature tells us about our little personal lives during a blizzard or hurricane.

It can be depressing to think that we fade as fast as fallen snow after the temperature rises. No, I am not at peace with that. Things might end in ice, Robert Frost said in his poem, yet for me ice does not suffice. It does, however, make me appreciate Spring.

Everything ends in ice, according to The Second Law of Thermodynamics. It's daunting to consider that hypothetical ninth plant that astronomers are now hunting, way out beyond the Sun's Kuiper Belt. Its orbit is so distant that Planet Nine could take between 10 and 20 thousands years to circle the sun.  Any snow that far out is not just water and it is eternal.

After that sort of pondering, plowing the driveway and drinking some hot chocolate are more than welcome. Those are things I can influence.

Mice in the Root Shelter!

I check our "Root Shelter," fashioned from a Cold-War Fallout shelter, weekly. So far the pumpkins and garlic in there have held up well, but I've had a special concern about the small harvest of sweet potatoes (no more than 25 pounds) that we gleaned this year. A neighbor gave me another 25 pounds, and I've kept them in a cool utility room. I've been planning to move them to the Root Shelter  but have been rather lazy about it.

Finally I went to check things today.  I am glad I did. The tubers already there were wrapped in newspaper to absorb any moisture and put in bushel baskets with lots of air circulation. The door is tight and features breathing holes with 1/4" hardware cloth. The walls are cinder block and the whole thing is underground.

Imagine my disgust when over half our sweet potatoes had been gnawed by mice!  I took a basket full of basket cases out to our compost heap.

Our pumpkins, garlic, and pearl onions were fine, untouched by the little gluttons.

This warning meant going back to the drawing board about the Shelter and how food get stored.  Baby mice can squeeze through an opening the diameter of a pencil; adults, I've read, can get through a hole the size of a human pinkie.  They can gnaw wood and plastic with ease. Metal will stop them. So will our building's resident black snakes, which are hibernating now, and barn cats.

We don't have a barn cat with access to the building, since we keep it locked. Killing mice myself poses no moral problems at all, but I won't employ poisons. A dead mouse could be eaten by our predators, killing our pest control service! Poison could also find its way onto the food in the shelter. I am not squeamish at all about setting snap-traps, but the potatoes still needed better storage. Next year we will harvest a large number of Kabocha Squash for a local restaurant, and I don't want this happening again for a cash crop.

Homesteading and survivalist forums are full of tales about how to store things in root cellars. Mice can gnaw through plastic, so a simple ventilated tote would not do.

Some folks employ metal trash cans, which I have used with great success for feed for our chickens, cats, and the dog. Drilling lots of holes (no more than 1/4" across would not be too onerous, but I had a tote and hardware cloth. So I got right to work.

My invention involved using a tote with a removable, one-piece top, rather than a hinged one. I cut away all but the rim, so the contents would breathe, and put hardware cloth inside, fastened to the plastic by screws and washers. Next I lined the inside of the tote with more hardware cloth, after drilling lots of 1/8" holes all over the tub's bottom and sides.  The metal sides come up high enough to meet the wire on top.

I plan to check this frequently, especially now that I have some snap-traps down, baited with peanut butter.  I hope we have sweet potatoes come spring! None of our seed potatoes were eaten, so we'll be starting fresh for a bigger harvest in 2016.

Winter Chores

We did not have too much of a winter until last week, thanks to El Niño. I don't much care for warm Decembers, but some Fall chores did get done. My old friend Dominic and I began working to paint a barn roof and I was able to service some equipment that gets harder to do when the mercury drops below freezing.

It has been pleasantly refreshing to hear people note, usually at the cashier's station in rural stores, that this warm weather "just ain't right." In town, however, one does not hear as much of that. It's tempting to give someone a tongue-lashing, so instead I just say "enjoy the season for what it is."

Out in the sticks, my answer is to use the cold weather we finally got for that which is best done in the cold. On the farm that means clearing land for future planting or to prevent saplings from shading our garden out of existence. Winter means getting into places that will certainly be "snakey" in April and May. Having nearly stepped on a a basking Copperhead in 2012, I now appreciate better where serpents like to have a home, and I respect that as long as they respect my space.  For now, my resident and nonpoisonous black snakes are under ground or in a cozy barn-corner, waiting for mouse-hunting season to resume.  The barn, meanwhile, gets filled with additional firewood just in case March surprises us.

In our soggy low places, the ground often freezes nicely.  I can then tromp around and post no-hunting signs and clear an old road to get through the woods to the beeyard. Two junked cars block it for now, but they'll be gone soon. Lots of other junk gets pulled out of the woods to be discarded or reused (mostly, junked). We cut a road to an old run-in full of overly seasoned but usable firewood. It's a pile I dare not disturb after April Fool's Day.

The nicest accidental discovery of the season came via Nancy's looking online about blackberries. She discovered that they fruit best on second-year canes, and that fact provides a great method to keep two huge "patches" in production, yielding jam, pies, and cobbler for us and provender for the wildlife.  I will run a rotary mower (aka "Bush Hog," a brand name) over 1/3 of each patch annually.  That will cut in lanes for harvesting without stepping on snakes or getting tangled in thorny canes. One only picks blackberries at the edge of a patch, though the best ones always seem just out of reach! There's a lesson of something.

All these things and more are possible in the coldest months, as long as the snow does not fall too deeply. This week, as Dom and I put window panels in our new greenhouse, a flurry blessed us for a few moments with the wonder of the season. It hissed down and reminded us, as it piled up quickly, that the universe is both indifferent to us and, with the right attitude, lovely in its indifference.

And later there will be blackberries.