Sunday, March 30, 2014
The Seeding Process Continues...
The seeding process continues throughout the winter season... just awaiting Spring around the corner. Our previous post called Sowing Seeds showed the beginning stages of our seeding stage of the season. This post will catch up through today's transplanting of the last of the cell flats/trays into 3 inch diameter cups.
We sometimes take the larger cupped plants outside of the grow room to get a little natural sunshine.
The cucumbers sprouted very quickly... these are only a few days old!
By 3/20/14 some of the tomato plants in the cups were getting so big, they were due to transfer into larger containers. So we went out back and pulled all of our old plant pots and got them ready to pot later that week.
On transplanting day these babies were ready to spread their roots in bigger pots!
We have tons of pepper plants too... but, not enough pots!!
Can you say "we need more potting soil!"
Got the majority of the largest tomato plants into the large containers. The Big Beef tomato plants in the huge pots Will stay there the entire Spring & Summer seasons. The others will be transplanted into the raised beds or garden around mid-April.
And then the question came up about what are we going to do with these potted plants at night when the temperature drops? So we loaded them on the small trailer and we push them into the barn at night with the tractor/pull them outside in the morning sun.
Morning sun!
So the search was on for more pots... Was just about to take the plunge and order online when one of our friendly landscaping supply house's decided to donate their leftover black pots! SCORE!!!
And the transplanting frenzy started this past week... trying to get all of the sprouted plants out of the cell flats/trays and into cups and all of the plants in cups right now into the 1/2 gallon black pots!!
You can see the plants' roots in the cups are ready to stretch out in a bigger container.
Successfully transplanted 80 plants into 1/2 gallon pots on Saturday afternoon (tomatoes, peppers and dill).
Some were set in the blank spots on the trailer...
This morning we upgraded the small trailer of plants to the large tractor trailer...
My goal was to transplant all of these cell flats/trays into cups. Can you say LOFTY goal? I started at 11:00am today...
Got all but one flat transplanted in over 8 hours of work... 256 total cups completed!!! Today's transplanting included tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, misc. cucumbers, 2 types of squash, and zucchini. Will try to transplant the last flat tomorrow!
First Round of Bees Arrived!
Our three packages of honey bees that we ordered back in December were scheduled to deliver the week of 3/17... They arrived at our farm on 3/22. And we had to get ready for them by constructing a new stand and get all the hive boxes ready to go for them to reside in once they arrived. We decided to locate them on the high ridge closer to the front of our property near the pine tree buffer. And here is how the timeline played out:
Setting up to construct the new stand for the 3 hives to sit on.
Precise measurements so all the pieces match up.
Cutting the pieces.
Pulling it all together.
Stenciling our farm name.
Hauling the boxes to their new location.
Constructing the stand in place.
Setting up the hive boxes before the bees arrive.
The calm before the storm.
Can you see the bees in the two packages here?
This is how you dump the bees inside.
Now Hubby dumps package # 2.
And then package # 3.
Closing the last one up.
Feeding them sugar water.
Top is on.
Woo-weeee those bees were crazy around those hive boxes for several days!
Saturday, March 29, 2014
House Building Contd.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)