One of the little innovations that we have adopted this year is new seed starting shelves. They have improved our volume, reduced the time to emergence and the time and effort required to managed the trays (essential for part time farmers). All of our transplants are started in a glass greenhouse attached to the house. Jamey and his dad built them this Spring. By adding vertical space, we have increased the area available to transplants, critical given the number of trays of broccoli, oracle, tomato, beans, fennel, squash, melons, cucumbers, cabbage, rapini, etc… this year with Club SBG. (usually for the farmers market we put most of our emphasis on salad greens).
With the shelves we can fit a lot more trays into the greenhouse. As the glass greenhouse isn’t heated we have to bring the tender crops indoors on cold nights. Hauling trays, one-by-one indoors is a pain in the arse. Not only was it a slow and tedious process, but it had to be done at inopportune times – before bed when we were exhausted from working down in the field and first thing in the morning when we were rushing to get to the day jobs. Now we just have to wheel 3 shelves into the house. Very nice.
The neat thing about the shelves however is that they have their own heat source. We installed a 200 watt lightbulb at the base (on a removable sheet of plywood). The lightbuld creates just enough extra heat to warm the seed trays, hastening emergence. We got tomatoes in 7 days. We added a plastic wrap to the shelves that traps in a bit of heat and moisture and voila, we have our own little growth chamber! Someone asked where we got the idea. Back in University, Jamey and hig Dad (again, some things never change) built a food dehydrator using a similar design.
The shelves were easy to build using assorted 1×2, 2×2, 1×4 and 2×4 lumber we had laying around. In the pictures is the shelf in the kitchen tonight (forecast is cloudy and cool). On the shelves are some late tomatillos, 2nd planting of fennel, melons and lemon cucumbers, and a tray of celeriac on top (already emerged but tempermental) and beans, 240′ish little beans that will crack the surface any day now. fun fun!!! Where will we put all the beans in the field? SBG’s space issues will be the focus of a future post. (: ):
