More Spring Fever

Yesterday I got Todd to put up the small greenhouse I purchased at Bi-Mart. It's made of metal tubing and connectors, with wire shelving, covered with a plasticky translucent green tarp thingy, so it's portable, lightweight, and inexpensive (I think I paid $70 for it.) It's got enough shelving space for 14 trays of plants, and I can walk in and easily stand up in the center. It's a "one-butt greenhouse", kind of like a "one-butt kitchen", but Evie and I have enough room to work if we're focused on the same thing. I pulled a small bench/storage thingy over near it, and I'm going to be doing potting there until we get the barn style garden shed built.

So since that was finished and up, today I went to Wilco with the intention of getting potting soil and a few more trays for my greenhouse. That store is dangerous...it's a farm supply store. There are a few kinds of stores that are always deadly to my pocket book: craft/bead stores, hardware/home stores, bookstores, and Wilco. Today was no exception.

I purchased a thermometer for the greenhouse and mounted it inside. I need to be sure it's going to be warm enough in there for seedlings before I get started; really, I'm several weeks ahead of the curve for planting where I live, but the stores are all so enticing with the seed displays and the new plants! But if I can keep the greenhouse warm enough, it won't matter if I'm early, and the plants will be all the bigger by the time I transplant. Some seeds I will be direct-sowing either singly or using seed tape (carrots, radishes, lettuce) so they'll get planted later anyway.

They had baby chickies at Wilco! I am so tempted to buy some more. They had a whole pile of Buff Orpington babies, which are a soft puffy yellow and decidedly "standard chick, generic, one each" looking. They also had a big vat of Aracauna chicks, and they were tempting too. They grow into rather ugly chickens, IMHO, but they lay colored eggs, which would be fun. I decided to wait until next spring, as about that time my girls should be deciding it's time to molt, and new chicks will reach laying age about the time my girls are starting to slow down. If I wind up with 10 all full-bore laying, I'm going to get buried in eggs. I could just hang up a sign on the fence advertising eggs, I suppose. Found out that if I am an egg producer selling eggs directly from the same premises where they are produced,

I also bought some more trays and some inserts. I couldn't decide between the paper pots which you can plant with the seedlings, or the little plastic inserts. I chose some of both, along with some pop-up peat pots for Evie's entertainment. I'll figure out what works best for next year.