Drats, killed 'em dead!

I had an extra Jalapeno that was taking up too much room and was also partially injured due to a previous accident here.. that, and a basil plant that was kicking around as well that wasn't getting any bigger in it's Dixie cup. Decided to see how 'hardy' those guys could be in the hoop house overnight. The answer: Not hardy enough. Both looked pretty much dead this morning when I took a glance at 'em. They were still standing tall last night at midnight when I got home from work, but this morning, all droopy and bent over. Pretty much killed. Heh! So much for *that* experiment.

That garlic is still looking pretty good, but still seeing only 4-6 shoots per square coming up from the 9 that were planted in each square. Hmm..

A little dirt pulled aside (dirt, or llama poo? Yikes!) from the top of the hops bed shows some green hop bustin' up action in the Cascades department. Interesting. With the 6-12" of snow predicted for this Friday, I just covered 'em back up with a pile of leaves and hope that works well enough to keep the new guys safe for this week.

All the tomatos from the propagator were transfered over to the 4 pak seedling trays, the Roma's and the Cherry's.. here's a pic of those in furious action. They're all lined up on the wet mat in the propagator still, but that's just temporary.

Roma and Cherry tomato seedlings.. 

The onions are doing well too.. they got ejected from the propagator's wet mat too, but they seem to be happy enough on their tofu trays. :)

Onion babies. Almost time for a haircut!

That's all.. gotta go prepare for the big storm now to set us back another few weeks. Drats..

Quick update.. big change!

Made a big change to the operation today. My Jalapeno's are coming up all leggy, stretching for the lamps.. knew I had to get 'em higher up to the lamps quick, but with the other big plants under there, something had to go. So, with that in mind.. I went out and found the ol' chicken heat lamp setup in the garage and figured I'd give that a whirl. I hooked up this lamp to the same timer as the T5's so they'll all go on and off at the same time, and now I've got this:

The whole propagator got moved up to the lamps again like its supposed to be, and the big jalapeno's and basil got moved off to the left side there, under the chicken lamp, which now has a 23w florescent light bulb in it. Like this:

Once I had the propagator up there, I left it alone for a while to see how things would go.. I just went to check on it a sec ago after a couple hours in its new location and saw the leaves of the peppers starting to curl back, so I figured I'm too close.. so I just dropped 'em back down a couple inches and we'll see how that goes now.

In other news, here's the back yard as it stands.. still thawing:

Epic fail? Habaneros are stubborn..

I am seeing a total ammount of nothing from the Habanero seeds I put into the propagator back on the 14th of February.. I know these can take some time, and of the six I put in of the first batch, I got only one.. but really, I put like eighteen seeds in this prop, and I got nothing showing right now. That's sorta sad. On the bright side, I have half of the Hot Cherries sprouting now in a cup with a damp paper towel under the lights, so I figured I'd toss the rest of my Habanero seeds into the same situation because it's looking pretty bleak otherwise. Nothing going on in the newly seeded props, but those are really brand new so far, so I'm not stressed about those yet.. check a pic of the germination cups right now though:

Hot Cherry Pepper seedlings

The fluffy stuff is rootlets, I believe..

In other news, I just took my digital thermo outside and put it on the edge of the hoop house, on the outside of the house. Here's a pic of that and the temp outside right now:

And a few hours later, I took a pick of the same thermo, that I had put inside the hoop house propped up on a cup to keep it up off the snow. Check it out:

And there it is, 55 degrees. Considerably warmer in the house than it is outside.. I'm surprised the snow isn't melting faster, for sure, though.

Oh, also found out.. the Jalapeno's I have are the Early variety, supposedly ready to roll in like 75-85 days. I've already took a chunk of that up already.. two months they've been in here!

Otherwise.. everything else is status quo. Stand by for further info..

Hoop house back in action..

Just a quick pic of the hoop house that I recovered today... figured I'd throw some plastic on it and set 'er back out on the bed and see what kind of heating action I could get out of the thing. I'd like to see some snow melt-age out there and start to dry up the soil a bit so I can get some early plants into the ground.. but gotta get through that 2 feet of snow stuck to the things.. bummer. Here's a shot of it:

Far..

Close

I tried something new this time and used a standard technique that a normal greenhouse assembler would have used, unlike my attempts last year.. in that I used furring strips around the edge to hold the plastic down, and hopefully this time it won't all tear up and get stupid on me. But heck, this time I'm using real MAN SIZED plastic, nto flimsy painters plastic.. this is good, think material. There's also two layers of it, cause I couldn't *quite* get one piece to entirely cover the whole house, so the plastic overlaps about 4/5ths of the other piece of plastic. That piece of red tape is where the upper-most piece of plastic ends, and I just taped it up to keep it from flapping around in the breeze. We'll see.

The whole unit was just buried under some snow and ice, and it took quite an effort to get it unstuck. I'll have to see if next year I have the foresight to not leave the damn thing out there all winter.. that was like work.

Additionally, I scored a pack of Neseed branded Hot Cherry Peppers this morning while getting some dog food.. nice! I am trying something different with these guys.. instead of just putting these straight into the propagator, I'm putting these little guys into a small plastic tupperware container on top of a damp piece of paper towel.. and whatever decides to germinate will get popped into a propagator tray afterwards. I think it's going to be more work this way than it would have been otherwise, but I wanna try this method out, as I think it will be more useful with iffy seeds that I'll plant in the future.. you know, to check viability of things and all without wondering what's going on under the dirt that you can't see.

Zone control and eHLT..

I think I pretty much failed to capture any of it in photos, but me and Jeremiah took the eHLT for a spin last Friday and brewed up a batch of stout with the new eHLT in action. It performed flawlessly and I love the conversion. I am, so far, highly recommending this procedure. The new stout uses 12% roast barley, up 2% from the last batch, and I dropped the chocolate malt 1% as well.. we'll see hw this works out. Unfortunately, when I got home I found the Breiss Roast barley is only 300L instead of the normal 500L of most other brands.. but the SRM numbers came up into Stout territory, so we'll just have to check that color when it's in the glass. That beer is still in the fermenter, and the Amber is up next on deck.. so it'll be a few weeks before it's test time. Stand by for that..

Otherwise, I had a bit of a run in with this thing a couple of days ago:

That's a zone control power head motor you're looking at there in the top picture, and the housing it normally is bolted to in the lower picture. The motor itself failed, the housing was fine. In my particular heating setup, with a hot water boiler, a circulator pump and a couple of zone control valves, this things job is to either open or close the appropriate zone valve to let hot water through into the correct baseboard heater. If you failure, like I did here in the upper lever of my house, you might get a valve stuck in the OPEN position.. which results in unbearable heat all the time, unstoppable, unless you turn off the boiler and kill the heat. Since this broken condition was discovered at midnight when I got home, I had *all night* to think about it, and no idea what was actually wrong with the thing. Long story short, the next morning I got up, packed the kids off to school and sent the momma to work.. and then broke out the internet and became an expert on hot water heating systems in about two hours. After I got my education, I started diagnosing the issues from the thermostat to the boiler.. and eventually found this thing to be the culprit. A quick trip to T-town and $37.37 later, I ha the new part installed and it's been working fine ever since.

Who's the man?

Tis' all for now.. tomorrow, I have that Salsa making class to go to and then the Commando party in the evening after the kids concert. Maybe get some pics from the party to post up.. then, I'm gonna cut down all the lettuce and arugula in the hoop house and call that project finished. I just noticed I had a couple of lettuce plants keel over and die, so I think about mid to late November is about all I can really expect from a hoop house for keeping things alive. Time to get the rest of the nutrients into that lower bed and get some manure in there to do it's thing over the winter. Good times!

Oh yeah, also got my new sourdough starter fired up and I'm trying to get my first firm starter to do it's thing as I type this. We'll see how that goes..

A bit of a frost..

So there was a bit of a frost last night. Took some pics of the bed with the hoops on it to show, and also an update on the Garlic planting that I did the other day. Check the garlic first:

Gonna be planted in the upper bed, in the four squares right next to the end-most ones..

Holes dug for garlic bulbs, and garlic jammed in..

Those three at the top are actually Organic Elephant Garlic from the store.. just for fun

And some mesh over the top to keep the damned dog out.

Otherwise, here's some pics of the interior of the hoop house I mentioned above after the frost last night. Clearly, the basil didn't like this frost idea at all, and it's totally expired now. But everything else looks OK. Check it out..

See? Everything else is OK.. 

So, the experiment continues, minus the basil. That basil was a bit more fragile that I had anticipated. I thought for sure that, under the hoops, it would get past a minor frost like this one.. I think we only just barely touched 32-ish.. not a deep freeze by any means. Live and learn. Maybe if I'd had some thicker plastic it would have done better, but too late to find out now. ;) Next year..

'Quebec' Citra single hop brew and garlic bed prep..

Me and Timmay whipped up a single hop IPA the other day (code named 'Quebec'!) all IBU'd up with just 12.3% AA Citra hops for the duration. Here's a couple of pics of the operation in action, including a mash paddle solo by Tim, the throttling of the growler of yeast to give up the goods and the finished product in the bottle, pre-ferment. Check it:

Mash paddle solo..

Yeast wrangler, or yeast strangler?

That's 5.5 gallons of good times waiting to happen right there!

In other news, I did some work prepping the upper bed for the overwinter/garlic planting. Here's the upper bed, all llama manured up with two 10 gallon buckets worth of manure spread over the top. I spread the manure for the obvious reasons.. good, well processed organic material, with a small amount of all the right vitamins and minerals. But I also added a couple other things, including Greensand and Bone Meal. The greensand is a sandstone, which is mainly used as a soil conditioner. It helps soils with too much clay loosen up and, conversely, helps soils with too much sand stick together a bit better, so as not to be totally limp-wristed when you go to work in it. It also has trace amounts of some minerals, mostly potassium. Since the upper bed I planted used a lot of topsoil, instead of the soil-less mix I used in the lower bed, this stuff I hope will come in handy to make this stuff a little bit nicer to work with. It got a touch compacted this past year. I also added the Bone Meal as well, for the phosphorus it contains. I get most of the Nitrogen in the beds from direct application of fish emulsion, so I didn't add anything with nitrogen to the beds. Hopefully, next year wil be fantastic in comparison this this time around, with all this prep work I'm doing now. Supposedly, the overwintering of the beds with the manure and supplements is one of the best things you can do to the joint.. if you try this in the spring, the stuff hasn't broken down and added what it's could have added in that short amount of time. The compost will probably overwinter in the composter and be added in the spring as a top dressing, I'm thinking. We'll cross that bridge later.

Here's some pics of what it looks like now..

Yeah, I'm inadvertently organic.

In other news, the hoop house is still intact and functioning well. I lost a piece of tape on one of the ends,  so far, but still working well just the same. On an average 50's -ish temp day, if you stick your hand under the plastic, you can easily feel that it's 10-15 degrees warmer, and more moist inside than it is outside. I've also re-evaluated my plan with this thing and now I'm just looking to see how long I can get the plants that are in it to live into the cold months, through various degrees of frosts. The reason being, if next year I plant a bunch of lettuce and broccoli and spinach and I know the cold frame will extend the harvest up until the middle or end of November, or maybe into December, then I know I pretty much need to eat up everything inside it by that time. So, I've got a few lettuce and other things still around in there that I would really like to eat now, but I think in the name of science, I'll leave them be until I see how long they'll last inside the hoops. They sure look delicious right now, though.. hmm..

Stay tuned for the garlic bulb planting episode coming up..

Low hoop house build..

That's what they call one of these things, anyway.. I'm most of the way through a book called "The Four Season Harvest" by Elliot Coleman.. husband of Barbara Damrosch, author of "The Garden Primer" one of my favorite gardening books. Pretty good husband/wife team, right there. Both books recommended to me by a pal of mine, who is also a bit of a cold season farmer himself (Hi Kevin!). I had initially set out ot build a cold frame, with raised sides and flat glass 'lights' to let the sunshine in, but after reading this book, and perusing some other sources, I've decided to go with what the call a 'Low Hoop House'. Think big, full size plastic covered greenhouse all shrunk down to about 2-3' tall and you've got the idea. Technically, I think a greenhouse you can walk into is called a High Hop House, and one you can't fit into is called a Low Hoop House. So, that's what I've got.

The idea is to provide a bit of protection from the elements, and raise the temp's inside a bit to keep things from totally freezing solid and getting ruined. Or, if things *do* get frozen, during the day the sun can warm 'em back up and the ice/whatnot melts off, and you harvest stuff in the late morning or afternoon times. There's a couple of key things with these buggers to keep in mind.. one is that there's different kinds of vegetables, some like it hot, some like it in-between temperature wise and some actually prefer it downright cold. The key for the  growing season in the fall and the subsequent winter harvest is simply to grow the right kinds of vegetables. Mostly this is gonna consist of things like leafy greens and other stuff, like carrots, which would also apply. The best of the bunch is stuff called Mache, the Chards, spinach, Brussels sprouts.. etc. The next key thing to keep in mind is that really *none* of these things actually grow in the cold.. they just don't get kicked to the curb, stomped on and destroyed when the temperatures dip into the 20's and 30's. They *survive*. They thaw. They manage to carry on. So, you gotta grow 'em when it's still fairly nice out (it's key lettuce, radish, chard season right now! I blew it on Brussels' sprouts, though..) and then protect 'em with some sort of covering, like a cold frame, a low hoop house, or a full-size greenhouse, if you're that fortunate. This post will just document the on-the-cheap build of my low hoop house. When I say cheap, I'm literally talking $20.14 out the door, with  some parts left over that I didn't even use. You could probably make this thing for $16 and change. And hell, it might just collapse with the first snow or violent wind.. but if it keeps my lettuce alive for 3 more weeks than it would have otherwise, who's better than me? Plus, in the spring, it'll help harden off the tomatoes and peppers and such, and let me start growing more cold tolerant things in Feb or March. And that's what I'm talking about. Check it:

Start with this stuff.. three or so 2x4's (which will eventually be ripped to 2x2 dimension..) or buy  few more 2x2's already cut. 2x4's are about the same price as 2x2's, so when you rip 'em down the middle, it's like a two for one special. A small bag of plastic pipe hangers (in the plastic bag there..) and a couple of PVC crosses, some PVC T's and I used four 10 foot lengths of PVC pipe, which we eventually cut a few feet of the bottom of to get the arch's just right.

Then use a Dremel tool or a big drill bit to hog out the insides of the PVC T's and crosses in the right places so that the PVC pipe can slide through them. The pic shows the inside of one bored out, and the other one slid up onto the PVC pipe.. You'll see how this slides together in a minute..

Next, build yourself a wooden frame from the 2x2's that'll fit nicely over top of your raised (or un-raised, I suppose..) bed..

..use the pipe hangers to trap the ends of the pipes onto the frames..

until you have something resembling this:

This could be a total piece of crap, keep in mind. My testing will either confirm or disprove that statement.

When you're done, drag it down and test fit the thing over top of your bed/beds. It should look something like this does:

Since I have a lip of 2x6 that's raised up a bit that runs the whole length of the back side of my bed here, I sorta use that as a hinge.. it's not a hinge, but it keeps the frame from calling off the bed in the back and allows me to easily tilt the frame up. If your borders are all even around the edges, you might wanna put a couple of hinges there to make it easy to tilt up and get into your beds.

Now, later on next month when it starts to get cold, I'll bring out some clear or translucent plastic and cover the thing, stapling it in place along the edge. You can lift up the whole frame like I'm doing in this pic to reach in and grab stuff from inside, and then drop it back down when you're finished. If it's warm in the day, you're gonna have to prop the cover up so as not to bake the veggies inside there.. supposedly, these things can boost the temps inside 10-15 degrees. Imagine if you've got a nice75 degree fall day,sunny out, and the temp inside there goes up to 85-90 degrees F, and you've got instant ruined produce.

That's all for now.. carry on.