Monday, September 14, 2009

Cold Frames

It's plantin' time again on the old homestead. After tilling in four bales of hay earlier in the summer, and tilling the weed seedlings several times as the summer progressed, Laura and I set the coldframes into position and planted them on Sept. 3. The brush pile we talked about the other day smolders in the background.



Here's a close-up of the emerged seedlings. I sow thickly to compensate for the seedling-destroying pillbugs. The nearest coldframe contains 4 kinds of kale. The next one has 3 kinds of collards; the next one has 2 kinds of beets, mizuna, and a couple of potato plants; and the last one has spinach and lettuce. I'm in the process of building another coldframe at the bottom of the Ark, that I'll report about later.
BTW I'm trying out potatoes as a winter crop for the first time as an experiment. I want to see if I can harvest new potatoes continuously all winter long. Probably not, but it's worth a try.