Welcome to yet another gardening blog. As the title says, this one is dedicated to forcing flower bulbs and other season extension techniques and occasional digressions as seems appropriate. A little introduction and gardening background is probably a good way to start. My name is Darrell and I live in a zone 5B in a North Idaho snow belt. As an Engineer, I have a habit of dabbling in improving things and the long winters here have lead me to the hobbies mentioned above. Our winters can really vary! At times we have 6 - 8 feet of snow and it lasts forever. Other times we have winters like this last one, reasonably warm (low of 0 degrees F) where I only plowed once and the kids never got a chance to sled.
Well enough about me. For starters, I think I'll talk a bit about one of the most influential gardening books I've read, Four-Season Harvest by Elliot Coleman. Driving me is the periodic food contamination in our national system and the desire for my kids to taste vegetables as they should taste. If I don't show them how it should be, who will?? Anyway, Mr. Coleman's description of the 4 season harvest really caught my eye so I decided to do my version of his plastic hoop setup with floating row covers. Living on a rock "ripple" left by the pre-historic floods here has me using raised beds with soil I brought in. To accommodate crop rotation, I designed a greenhouse that could be split in half for moving and re-assembled over the next bed the following year.
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| Greenhouse December 2007 |
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| Inside Greenhouse |
It's made of welded rebar with slit poly-pipe from Home Depot. Over it all is a layer of UV resistant gardening plastic. The poly-pipe is to keep the rebar from wearing holes in the plastic. For clamps, I have small sections of poly-pipe that I've slit down the center. With the plastic , the pipe and plastic combo is just a little larger than the inside diameter of the "clamps" so they hold on well. The corners of them do need to be trimmed on a diagonal to keep from inadvertent slicing of the plastic sheet. Anyway, enough with the construction. The execution went quite well despite one of the heaviest snow winters we've had in a long time. I planted a lot of spinach, arugula, carrots to try Mr. Coleman's "candy carrots", and various greens that he recommended but I've never tried (red kale, miners lettuce, claytonia, etc).
It worked out really well. However, if I had done a better job with my timing, I would have had a better combination of late Fall/Winter and Winter/Early Spring crops. We kind of just ignored the carrots which we had actually planted earlier in the year. They hadn't done very well, so had been left alone. Anyway, when eaten after winter, they really were quite sweet and an unusual treat. In particular, I like the convenience of having a good crop of arugula - I love a bunch on a meat sandwich along with some dill pickles.
Two topics come to mind for the next post. I am not sure which I'll pick: a failure I had extending the season for some rosemary or an aspect of forcing bulbs.
Till next time,
Darrell
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