Steady on

This is a quieter week in terms of activity to write about on the veggie front.  Many of the varieties have been in the soil for a month now - seedlings all over the place.  The earliest to plant are the varieties that need the most development prior to being set out in the field or cold frame, such as tomatoes, peppers, onions, lemon grass.  A few other things that I have started are lettuce, cabbage and of course, the carrots have been set out to seed this week in the experimental heated planting bed (see last week's post).

With regard to the heated bed, I have experienced some minor setbacks with the heat source (furnace) being the culprit 3 out of 4 times - the other time was my own fault, forgetting to check on the fire and it went out.  I have been tracking and recording temperatures several times daily, so I will be able to plot results in a more visible graph method.  So while not too much vegetable activity is required, we have been doing spring cleanup in the yard - deadfall and firewood cleanup, last year's pots and such that didn't make the trip back to storage...all the usual things you would find after winter.

Here are a few photos of the seedlings - a glimmer of hope that summer is coming!

Part 3 - Heat controlled planting bed

Over the weekend, I was able to complete the plumbing of the heating system in the new Hot House.  Once I had the system assembled, I connected the hot water from our wood stove and checked for leaks. Only a couple, but quickly fixed. It was mid-afternoon and a heavy rainstorm was moving in so I wanted to be sure that everything was working to save being out in the rain doing final connections.

So the bed temperature was only a few degrees above 0 C, and the water coming in was around 50 C. In about 16 hours, the soil mass had increased in temperature to about 14 C. Stoking the fire, I got the water temperature up to about 70 C and while the cold weather Sunday and Monday passed, the heat mass of the planting bed seemed to be stable, but too cool for what I had planned, to be able to control the temperature around 24 C. However, I did add 80 litres of ice-cold water to the bed in that time and the heat had to rise up through 45 cm of soil - this would make the heat up time a bit slower.

So Tuesday and Wednesday have been much warmer and the furnace water has been coming in at a more regular temperature range, 60 to 75 C, depending on the state of the boiler. Tonight, the bed temperature has exceeded 24 C and is at about 32 C! So it is a very slow process to heat the soil in the planting bed, but with a bit of ambient heat gain, it has warmed the bed nicely and is holding well.

Observations will be kept and by Saturday, I should be able to put the carrot seed in place both in this heated bed and the control plot in an unheated bed. I will post the results as the carrots start to sprout!

Bumblebees and Pollinators

There is always something to learn.  As we have been ramping up this market garden project of ours over the last 5 years, I recognized that poor vegetable success isn't just a case of poor soil or lack of water or even what seems to be unusually cool weather.  Pollinators, whether actual honeybees managed by a beekeeper or bumblebees, naturally occurring are key to having a great vegetable crop where the plant flowers need pollen transferred from flower to flower.

An excerpt from the Xerxes Society's website - http://www.xerces.org/bees/

     "Bees are undoubtedly the most abundant pollinators of flowering plants in our environment. The service that bees and other pollinators provide allows nearly 70 percent of all flowering plants to reproduce; the fruits and seeds from insect pollinated plants account for over 30 percent of the foods and beverages that we consume. Beyond agriculture, pollinators are keystone species in most terrestrial ecosystems. Fruits and seeds derived from insect pollination are a major part of the diet of approximately 25 percent of all birds, and of mammals ranging from red-backed voles to grizzly bears. However, many of our native bee pollinators are at risk, and the status of many more is unknown. Habitat loss, alteration, and fragmentation, pesticide use, and introduced diseases all contribute to declines of bees."

What we have seen in our yard is an increase in the number of bumblebees, year after year. After a poor year with growing squash and pumpkins in 2013, I had vowed to hand-pollinate in 2014, which I did, every morning possible.  It improved our crop production quite a bit.  While out in the garden, I did notice there were a few bumblebees around the squash flowers, but only a few. Then in 2015 it was an amazing time amongst the squash varieties and the cucumber trellises, with hundreds of bumblebees of a few varieties buzzing the flowers and moving pollen to our advantage while collecting it for their own use in the hive.  Another interesting feature in our yard was the oregano plant in our front garden.  The bumblebees loved this plant with it's delicate purple blossoms, visiting it from first light until early evening.  So what had changed?  We were building a natural habitat that the bumblebees thrived in.  Other features I began to realize were contributing to this change were the massive crop of Canada Thistle south of the garden, and the untouched section of grassy land north of the garden featuring Timothy, Brome Grass, Black-eyed Susans, Daisies and some other wildflowers.  The heavy grass and stems close to the ground are a preference for nesting.  A little further afield we do have some old, rotting tree stumps, logs and branches some of this pushed into piles with a bit of soil left in them.  This also is a favorite for nesting bees.

When I was cleaning the greenhouse, I did find some bumblebees that got trapped inside and had died.  So I carefully collected them and took photos of the three bumblebee types.  The most interesting to me is the Tri-colored Bumblebee, with a double orange stripe on it's abdomen.  This is the variety of bee that likes the Oregano plant.  The other 2 I have yet to identify for certain, but these are the type I've found around the other plants in the garden.

This year I have the Rocky Mountain Bee Plant that I am adding to the yard which is especially attractive to bees.  I will also be sure to grow a larger variety of flowers and also watch that the habitat structures around the yard do not get changed.  So it will be interesting to observe any changes to the bumblebee population this year.

A few other websites that feature great information on bumblebees and pollinators:

http://pollinator.org/canada.htm
http://savethebumblebees.com/index.html
http://farmsatwork.ca/pollinators/native-bees?_ga=1.27851508.915607232.1439311347

Part 2 - Experimental planting beds – know your veggies!

Research is Important.

We have a book called, “The Vegetable gardener's Bible”. The title indicates it is a book you should be reading every chance you get regarding your veggies. I would give the book a good mark in this case – it is full of info, useful, day-to-day info that you shouldn't even begin to memorize, since it is nicely tabulated in this book.  You will learn and retain the info you most need to know, but the book will always be nice to go back to every year.

One thing I was unaware of until I had this book is the fact that certain seeds need certain temperatures to germinate. I wondered why our carrot seeds didn't start well if we had cool days, sometimes even if it was partly sunny, but not super warm. Yet, cucumber seeds just take off and grow and beans seem to be the most tolerant in terms of early seeding and survival. In the book, it says that carrot seeds need 24 degrees to germinate well. That is quite a requirement in terms of needing that level of heat for the 6 day germination period. Soil in the sun has to warm up in the morning and only keeps it heat when the sun is out. Of course, there is the case of frying the seeds if you don't have enough water to keep the soil wet at the same time the sun is beating down on it.

My new greenhouse has an experimental planting bed will accomplish a consistent temperature control to maximize the seed start. This will allow earlier seeding in the year than one can successfully accomplish outside. So here is the plan.

A planting bed with water line run through the bottom of it in six passes, giving about 120 feet of line in the 60 square foot planting bed. This line will exchange the heat from our outdoor woodstove to the soil. The soil temperature will be monitored with an adjustable thermostat set in the soil, the thermostat will control a valve in the hot water line to the planting bed. Because there is a large mass of soil with 60 square feet and 18 inches of depth, heat exchange should be quite even and easily controlled in this way. I will also have a portion of an unheated planting bed for the same carrot seed and use it as a control model – basically comparing the two plots and recording results. I am excited to see what will happen and will update as data becomes readable.  So in about 2 weeks time I should have things well underway.  It is going to be exciting!