Tracy & I have been planning for three weeks now. Planning what crops, varieties, succession plantings, how much we’ll need, companion planting, crop rotations, what goes in the perennial “forest garden” area, and all that. Tracy has used her spreadsheet mastery to come up with a calculator to help us figure out how many plants in so many row feet may yield so many pounds. It is a bit mind boggling at times, but we’re getting it!

It is very exciting to do this and every day of nice weather I’m wishing I could be working in the garden. But that will come soon enough and I’m sure, after a long hard summer, I’ll be looking forward to the break that fall and winter will provide.

Tracy & Jillian did a little research and came up with this idea for the compost bins. Considering I’m a lazy composter, this set up looks like it might be pretty good. We’re even being a bit scientific and picked up a compost thermometer to see if it is getting up to temp inside. Maybe later in the season we’ll make some worm bins and try vermicomposting also.

We started off with the idea of turning the horse barn back into a solar greenhouse. It had actually been built as a solar greenhouse back when Ben had the Boulder Valley School on the property. Perhaps we went a little nuts with the redesign which doubled the size, and made for a very expensive greenhouse. I’m sure if we would have just kept it simple, kept it the same size, we could’ve renovated it for considerably less than the full blown design would’ve cost.

Greenhouse out, garden in. Well, it would still be nice to have some small greenhouse to start plants in instead of buying plants. So, with a tight budget, we got a budget greenhouse. Two, actually. While they are tiny, they should be good enough to start some of our seedlings.