Lesson Learned

So last week i made one of my most neccessary purchases for the coming summer i bought a greenhouse. As this was the first large greenhouse i have ever bought i decided against going with a proper greenhouse in the tradtional sense and opted to use a garage shelter instead as the price was much lower for the amount of space that i have available in comparison to most greenhouses. It is 11 by 16 feet so it more than meets my space needs for starting my seeds till there ready to be transplanted outside for good. I learned a valuable lesson though after i finished setting it up as the day after we had a very strong an unexpexted wind storm that managed to rip the anchors out of the ground like they were nothing and threw off the extra bricks i had stacked on the legs to keep it weighed down. The legs actually snapped right in half from the wind. The good news though is that the damage was much less than i intially feared and other than the fact that my tomatoes and peppers are all now mixed up i fared rather well an lost only a handful of plants. So i think i have learned my lesson about the power of wind and before i put the greenhouse back up i will reinforcing it much more than before as the wind does blow strong around here since my parents farm is located on a ridge. The pictures show the greenhouse after i managed to pull it down during the wind storm. I will add more on this once i get the greenhouse up and running during the week,

A Little Box Of Joy

Nothing says spring like a box of day old chicks. I bought forty White rock to start off with this spring and will be hopefully ordering a few more batches in the summer and fall if i am able to find enough customers for them. This breed is the most common for meat production as they grow rapdily and are ready for market within six weeks in most cases. The weather has been on my side so far as the chicks are very vulernable to cold there first week which made it inevitable that the day i got them had to be the coldest in weeks. But other than keeping them in the basement for their first night they have been doing great as it can be very easy to lose a whole batch of them to disease, predators or cold if you arent extremely protective in their first weeks. I have them under two heat lamps to insure more than enough heat as they need it be at least 90F for their first week. Raising chickens can seem daunting to most people but it is actually not that hard once you get the hang of it. All it takes really is to properly understand an provide the conditions essential to their proper health, growth and space needs as this is the best way to insure a better tasting chicken. Unlike battery chickens which is how most chickens are grown in intensive farming these chicks will enjoy more space and more frequent coop cleaning than they would on a large scale farm. If your squeamish and like to know that the chicken you eat is well provided for then these would be the chickens for you. While their life isn't perfect it is definitely better than being raised for the deep fryer.

In this race to the sky who will be the tortoise and who will be the hare

So it is that special time of year again when seeds are beginning to sprout and tree buds begin to swell. I have begun to plant my seeds for this summer and i thought it was time to show you the first sprouts of the year which are a tray of Roma Tomato's. Peppers and Tomatoes are the first seeds that must be started indoors in early April so that they can be well established when they are transplanted out at the end of may early June. Once these seedlings which are growing rapidly are taken out of the seedling tray i will replace them with Broccoli seeds which need less time indoors and can be transplanted slightly earlier in may since they can better tolerate cool temperatures. Over the next few weeks i will be posting further on my planting and the progress of the plants as they graduate into my greenhouse. The other pictures are of the buds of my plum tree on top, pear tree second and my peach tree above the seedlings. which barely survived the winter but will hopefully do better this summer as they are a very difficult fruit to grow in Ontario unless your in the far south of the province.