Friday, February 27, 2009

Greenhouse Action!


The nursery greenhouse is up and running - I mean growing! It seems earlier than last year, but Andrea says it's about the same time.

One big change is our fancy new vacuum seeder. In the past, the trays have been seeded by hand, which is quite time consuming, especially with little tiny seeds! This machine has a row of needles (that can be changed according to seed size) that suck up one single seed and shoot it down the tube, aligned over a socket in the seed tray, neatly planting as many or as few seeds as we need in each tray. (Hector is our expert operator)

After the seeds are planted, they are covered with a bit more soil and vermiculite. We tuck them in and cover them each night and say "Good morning little onions" every new day. Once we have the big greenhouse cleaned and sterilized and the seedlings are big enough, they'll move across the road to make room in the nursery for new young food seedlings!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What cute little babies! Terri, are you the designated "Hello little onion babies" greeter?

-Pam

Lee said...

Thanks for this great post, including the pictures. This is my first year as a Harmony Valley CSA member, and I can't wait to see the farm in person and to start getting boxes of great food.