Plant Later in Spring.

Help the child to plant late enough in the spring so that germination will be prompt and frost unlikely to damage the planting. Children like fast results; its better delay planting for a week or two to help ensure steady growth. Choose Easy Weed Control. Decide on the method od weed control before mapping out the childs garden. Rows should be spaced widely enough to permit easy hoeing or mulch placement. Children under 12 shouldnt operate a rotary cultivator without direct supervision. Plant a solid bed if something only if you are convinced that the child can handle the intensive hand weeding that will be necessary during the early weeks. Work together. Working along with the child, you can casually pass along the gardening lessons youve learned from hard experience - things like waiting until the ground dries before digging it, giving indoor seedlings a week or two to become accustomed to outdoor weather before putting them in the garden, watering deeply rather than sprinkling lightly every other day, and avoiding the temptation to sow seeds too thickly or to cover them too deeply. Recognize, too, that the child needs to learn some things from experience, and will learn, if youre not pushing too hard for perfection. Eat the Produce. Whatever the child grows, use it respectfully and appreciatively. Even a few peas can make pea-potato soup. Zucchini may be picked young so as to use more of it. Perhaps the young gardener would like to eat it, stuffed with rice and meat and toped with cheese. Allow Exploration. Accept the childs need to explore, which may take the form of pulling up half-grown beets or dismembering a flower to see whats inside. And if the child eats the beans when harvesting from his or her five plants, be glad. What else is a garden for?

SECTION THREE Special Techniques and Situations

The world is so full of a number of things, Im sure we should all be as happy as kings Robert Louis Stevenson

23 Starting Seeds in the Greenhouse

Remember how you longed for your first bike, or perhaps for your first car? Thats how much I wanted a solar greenhouse! While we made plans for a new little house here on our homestead, I raised seedlings under fluorescent lights. Good seedlings they were, too, but I always conscious of the abundance of sunlight that blessed our south-facing land. I knew I could raise many more seedlings in a greenhouse. Well the dreaming and planning led to digging and building, and I now have a modest solar greenhouse attached to our home. You know, of course, what happens when you get what youve longed for: you than have a new challenge, that of making the best use of your much-desired acquisition. Ive learned a lot and believe me, Im still learning - about how to start seeds in my greenhouse and how to manage it, and Id like to share here some hints for running a productive solar greenhouse.

When to Start Seeds

Most people who have solar greenhouse use them both to start spring seedlings for garden transplants and to grow some vegetable plants to perk up the winter menu. Seed starting can go on all year round. For Planting Outdoors. My schedule for raising spring seedlings to be planted out in the garden goes something like this:

December - pansies (if I remember!) January - chives, leeks, onions, and Siberia and other cold-resistant tomatoes February- peppers March - hardy annual flowers, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, lettuce, parsley, and some tomatoes April - more annual flowers, eggplant, and more tomatoes May - cucumbers, melons, okra, and squash For growing in the Greenhouse. To produce food in the greenhouse, its best to plant seeds for fall and winter crops in August and September, while the sun is still strong; then you plants will be sturdy and well grown by the time cold weather and short days arrive. I start seeds of leaf crops in September and then transplant the seedlings six inched apart into the deep bed in the greenhouse. Seedlings can often remain in the flat, on hold, for another two months, during which time I gradually transfer them to the deep bed as space becomes available. I sow Chinese cabbage and Bibb lettuce seeds again in December for late winter harvest. A for cucumbers - one of my favorite greenhouse crops - I start seeds in August for early winter cukes and again in March for vines that will produce until summer. In general, leafy plans are more productive under glass than those that produce fruit, especially when light levels are low, but cucumbers produce well from fall and spring plantings, and beans will bear in late spring. From my experience, I can recommend Swiss chard, Chinese cabbage, leaf and butterhead lettuce, radishes, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, beans, and New Zealand spinach as good solar greenhouse food crops, but dont stop there. Other gardeners grow beets, turnips, garlic, watercress, and many other crops in their unheated solar greenhouses.

Design of the Greenhouse

Space doesnt permit a discussion of detail of greenhouse construction here. Whole books have been written on that subject alone. For the purposes of this chapter, well define a solar greenhouse as a structure that admits enough light to foster plant growth and stores enough heat from the sum to keep temperatures above freezing without using auxiliary heat. Our solar greenhouse is not a textbook ideal, but it serves us very well. Its small - 8 by 12 feet - with a high ceiling. A deep growing bed, enclosed by a concrete block wall, runs the length of the greenhouses south side. On the north side, weve settled five steel drums painted black and filled with water to soak up and store the warmth of the sun. On top of the steel drums, we created a work surface made of strips of locust lumber. Two locust-strip shelves line the tall north wall. The greenhouses concrete block foundation is insulated on the outside with panels of 2-inch urethane foam faced by pressured-treated exterior plywood. We used vertically installed patio replacement doors for the glazing and kept the well-insulated west wall unglazed. Our greenhouse has two 21- by 36-inch vent doors, both sandwiches of 1 1/2-inch Styrofoam fastened between panels of exterior plywood. The ceiling is unglazed and heavily insulated with Styrofoam panels. Preparing the Growing Bed. If at all possible, youll want to include a large growing bed in your greenhouse. This massive hunk of soil, of course, serves as the growing medium for your plants, but it also provides thermal mass to absorb and retain the sun warmth. When we built our greenhouse, we poured concrete for that section of the floor where we would walk and where we would store water-filled steel drums, but we left the ground area under our growing bed open so the soil in the bed could drain well. We built the two-foot-high bed wall of concrete blocks; then

we gradually filled in the bed, starting with three inches of gravel topped by four-inch blocks of hay peeled from spoiled bales. Then we added four inches of decomposing wood chips, about four inches of compost, and a good eight inches of loose garden soil mixed with several large bags or vermiculite and commercial potting soil. Each year we add another two to three-inch layer of compost mixed with approximately three quart-sized containers of wood ashes to the bed. We also dig into the bed any clean, fine-textured household scraps like tea bags and coffee grounds. A good population of earthworms lived in the original garden soil we put into the bed, but we also toss in a few new ones from time to help digest the tea leaves, aerate the bed, and add rich castings. We bend over backwards to avoid stepping, or even leaning hard, on that rich, loose soil, and five year later, its still loose enough to scoop up in our fingers. If I must step over the bed area, I lay a plank across the bed to walk on, resting it on the wall rather than on the soil. Making the Most Use of Space. The top of the wall enclosing the growing bed serves the same purpose as a wide south-facing windowsill in the house of any enthusiastic gardener - its packed with additional plants in containers of all descriptions. Even in a large greenhouse than mine, it isnt long before the growing bed is solidly carpeted with plants, and there you stand, juggling a flat of tomato seedlings in one hand and a pot of petunias in the other, wondering where to put them. Thats when you appreciate the other dimensions of the greenhouse: the height of the ceiling above the growing bed, the depth and width of shelving on the back wall, even the windowsills. A determined gardener can manage to make creative use of every cranny of growing space. The happy result is not only more food and flowers for the winter table, but also a lusher, softer atmosphere of abundance and growth within the greenhouse. Take that petunia or New Zealand spinach or sweet potato vine or any one of a dozen other plants whose natural habit is trailing or vining, and perch the plant on a shelf so the leaves and flowers can cascade down into the light. As for tomatoes, if theyre a bush variety like Tiny Tim, theyll do well in hanging baskets suspended near the glass over the growing bed. (Be sure to water the baskets more often than the planting bed because they dry out more quickly). Ive also augmented my sunnier growing area by bridging the space between the growing bed and the steel drums with a plank, on which I set basins of leafy plants angled toward the sun. The use of a trellis or some other support of string, poles, netting, or fencing can make good use of vertical space. Our cucumbers clime the fence next to the window, leaving space for a small planting of Bibb lettuce behind them. Ive even seen photos of a rock wall in the greenhouse in which herbs were tucked into spaces between the rock - a good productive use of some additional thermal mass.

Greenhouse Conditions
The from of greenhouse determines much of its efficiency, but there are other factors, too, that you can jungle to influence those critical greenhouse conditions: light, temperature, humidity, and good ventilation. Light. Lets consider first what you can do boost the level of light your plants receive, especially in winter when the suns rays are week and the days are short. If your greenhouse has fiberglass or acrylic glazing, the light will seem softer, more diffuse than the beams that stream through glass. Dont worry, though. These translucent glazing material actually scatter rays so that light strikes plants more evenly and without shadows than the more direct light that passes through transparent glass. (Glass has the advantage, though, of being more durable in the face of