Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Greenhouse

It has been over a month since we fired up the stove in our new greenhouse and I am continually amazed at how well everything has been growing.

We are trying to do everything from seed to harvest with out synthetic fertilizers this season, so it has been a bit of a learning experience. I will have to admit that we did use up some old bags of Promix BX, which does contain synthetic micro nutrients. We only did this because I had the bags and didn't want to throw them in the garbage. We are now starting to create our own potting mix with a combination of peat and compost. I will keep you posted on how well it works.

I found a product called fish agri, which I am told is used to supply nutrients to the growing seedlings prior to transplant, which I was told is needed in greenhouse production. Admittedly I was quite skeptical that this brown fishy mixture was going to be the answer to growing without synthetics, especially after the first application stunk up my greenhouse for a day.. But sure enough the onions and zinnias, which were starting to look a little yellow, are now green as ever..

Last year one of our potato customers gave us some heirloom black tomato seed that he had been saving each year. We grew a number of these plants in our u-pick last year, absolutely amazing flavour, them kept a couple fruit to save the seeds for our selves. From the 5 tomatoes we took seeds from last fall we now have over 100 plants in the greenhouse. We will be growing about 7 varieties in all this year, but one I am most looking forward to is called Chocolate Cherry.