Condemned to garden

Last Thursday, as I walked toward the greenhouse I noticed something strange: police tape. The greenhouse was roped off like some crime scene for CSI or NCIS. Upon further inspection I noticed a letter taped to the door: Certification of Posting, OSHA Notification of Alleged Hazards.

I quickly found Tracy who filled me in. OSHA had come by to inspect the greenhouse on Monday and apparently found a number of things wrong with it that were so bad the greenhouse could no longer be used by Tracy and the students in her classes. She had three hours to remove everything from the area including tools, storage containers, dozens of flats of seedlings, mature summer plants, a propagation table, etc. It must have been a crazy day.

By the time I got to her she was coping with this latest SNAFU in the  way all good gardeners do: with quiet irony and acceptance. She had no idea when we would be able to re-inhabit the greenhouse.

This couldn’t have come at a worse time for us as we are just beginning to get out the cold weather vegetables to harden off and start to seed the warm weather ones.

“We’ll be able to plant just enough to fill the Children’s Garden,” said Tracy. “But no more.”

In past years we have had lots of extra seedlings to give and sell to staff, visiting parents and contribute to the associated farm stand. There was also plenty left over if we had a bad bout of damping off or visiting vermin (both of which have happened this winter.) So now there is little room left for error or bad weather/luck.

The gardening program is now scattered to the four corners of Green Chimneys. Some seedlings are in the tack room, others are over at a neighboring farm, some are in the staff room for the farm. Our composting worms are taking residency in the livestock barn. We started off the hardening process even more quickly than typical by putting many flats in hot beds that Tracy had built out of rotting bales of straw and horse manure. She had been starting some early greens in the hot bed but that experiment died with our access to the greenhouse.  And my work area for my kids is being moved to an empty stall in the horse barn. Perhaps I will get a bag of oats and maybe a carrot if I do a good job?

So for the foreseeable future, we will be working outside unless the weather is quite horrible. In a certain way, this has become a forcing function for us to be outside and garden.

It had been a pretty raw day with a gray sky and temps hovering just around 40 degrees. But given the choice to be hanging with (and smelling) a dozen-plus horses in my own stall or be outside it was a no-brainer.

“Come on Ben, we need to reinstall these hoop houses.”

“But Mr. Keller, we took them down last week.”

“I know but we have had to make a change in plans because we need to warm up the soil faster than we thought we needed to last week. I’m sorry but this is what we need to do.”

Because it was cold, we actually worked a lot faster than we have on previous outings when the weather was more in tune with the idea of gardening. In about 15 minutes we worked ourselves into a good zone of warmth as we quickly put the hoops into the ground and then attached the Agribon row covers with clips.

My next charges weeded rows, mulched hostas, and built a boarder by the front gates out of rocks we found in the nearby woods. A few carrots that were planted last fall were proffered as a reward for a job well done; they were small but sweet to the palate. No one seemed to mind that we didn’t have a greenhouse anymore. We were outside, condemned to garden.

Comments

[erik]

Thanks. The only good news is that we dont use it that much in about a month as it gets too hot. Also when it rain, in the greenhouse it sounds like you are inside a kettle drum so we hold classes in the gazebo at the garden. It will become more critical come October, so we do have some time.

[The Sage Butterfly]

OMG! I hope you are able to reconstruct your greenhouse soon!