Thank goodness for the broccoli starts though! They’re cheering me immensely, even though there are so many I can’t think of what we’re going to do with the extra. If they produce all at once, some will end up at the local food bank and some might end up with the neighbors. Hopefully before we get too sick of the dark green goodness. Fortunately peas and broccoli are our staples for the summer stir fries, so we’ll sauce them up and eat like kings.

As for the beautiful pepper plants, they’ll continue to be safe and warm under the grow lights in the basement. There’s no way I’m putting them outside until we stop getting fresh snow on the mountain.

Seems the reason he was asking is that he has an 8 foot fence, which the elk regularly jump. Well, not regularly exactly. They jump the fence just as his corn is ripe and he’s ready to pick it, stealing it out from under him every year.
I’m glad I hadn’t been planning to plant corn. The last thing I need is an elk yearling inside the fence with a cow trying to rescue it.

Anyway, they’re making huge holes in the yard, digging trenches and filling them back in. Fortunately, they haven’t forgotten to put the pipe in the dirt for the new heat pump and there are fewer coils sitting around in the yard. This is excellent news, but has some interesting side effects.

1. The cats haven’t been outside and it’s nice out. The whining has been pretty irritating, but they’d hate it out there with all the machines and men. Not to mention all the gates are wide open.
2. The meadow is toast. That’s where they’re putting the “slinkeys”, so it’s all been pulled up and covered over again. This means lots of rocks on top of the soil, and more grass seed. Ah well, it will be worth it in the long run.
3. I will soon be able to start planting the peas. Once the big work is done, I can get peas and beans in the ground. The irrigation work will come later, but it’s not strictly required until May. Lets just pretend that’s more than 2 weeks away, ok?

The new setup for the seedlings is working spectacularly. Its turned out broccoli sprouts and fennel large enough to transplant into pots already. Even the catnip is growing like mad, and so far has gone unnoticed by the cats. I don’t know how long that will be true, but so far it’s a tiny miracle that I’m not taking for granted. In fact, things are going well enough that I’ve started the first crop of tomato seeds, for the early fruit that we may or may not actually get.

My method of growing plants has changed drastically and this seems to be making the lions share of the difference in the seedling robustness. This year, instead of trying to rely on sunlight, I’ve set up a shelving unit with florescent lighting above them. The lights get nice and warm, keeping the soil at a good temperature for germination and they’re on for about 8 hours a day, so they’re giving good, consistent light to the starts once they pop up. I have the sprouts in a seedling flat that sits on an old cookie sheet and draws water from the base – I put water in the sheet instead of watering from the top. So far, I’d say I’m at about a 90% germination rate. Most of the seeds are from last year and I wasn’t particularly kind to them during storage, so I can’t expect much more than that.

The hard part in this scenario is that the starts take up so much room after they’re separated into their 4″ pots that it’s going to be difficult to keep them all under lights until they’re ready for the (not yet built) cold frames. I’m not sure how that’s going to work out, but I expect that I’ll be able to put at least a few more on one of the shelves that’s not currently occupied. It may require some re-assembly of the shelving unit, but that’s only an afternoons worth of work. Here’s to hoping that I don’t forget to water and lose the lot!

My current setup is a cheapo metal shelving unit with the start bed in a cookie sheet. I’ve cut the bed so that it actually fits, as opposed to last year where I had it canted at an angle. I water the seeds from the bottom by dumping water in the cookie sheet and allowing the plants to pull as they choose. This seems to be much better than having the sheet on the counter; it was ust an enticement to the cats to graze on my starts last year. The seem to really like baby broccoli.

The biggest, and most important,  change to the setup is the addition of a shop light hanging right above the seedbed. I run it on a timer for 8 hours and it provides heat and light with the right intensity to get the seeds to germinate well. So far I’m at 100% germination, which is way above average. If each of these little guys keeps going at this rate, I’m going to fill the garden from 2 cookie sheets worth of trays. I love that idea.

We had the first of the bids come in last week, with the second shortly thereafter. The guys who do the bids don’t like to work weekends, so I have to be home and with the project load at the office it just hasn’t been feasible to do more than one bid a week. I’d been planning to get in 2 or 3 more bids before getting down to business and really making a decision on where our best value was. That was what I was planning until Saturday when the furnace gave up.

My guess is that the thing was on its last legs anyway and just hasn’t been treated well over the years (we’ve never had it serviced and the poor thing didn’t even have a filter on the air intake until we moved in). But all the fiddling the sales guys did, with the poking and prodding and measuring, it sure feels like it’s vengeance on the furnace’s part. Either that or Murphy’s screwing with us again.

Anyway, Saturday over lunch we did a rough back of the envelope ROI and decided geothermal was the only thing we were going to bother working on. The cost to get the furnace up and running is insane, and really its money better used to get us into the final solution instead of band-aiding our current situation. So we’re going to be roughing it for a few weeks, hoping that it doesn’t get cold enough that the solar gain during the day is enough to keep the house warm enough that we don’t feel like we’re outside all the time. We’ll see how long that lasts. If we can get our decision made soon, we might have heat in time for the weather to get better.

With the visit of the consultant, I was able to draw out a plan for 4 circuits to allow water to run to the garden. So we rented the trencher and went for it. There are now rows and rows of upturned soil just waiting to be smoothed and have pipe laid in them. We didn’t get any further than opening the trenches because the rocks here kept throwing the the chain off the machine. Two man rocks are just too big for even a good sized trencher to handle, and taking the thing back to the shop the have the chain reset multiple times sucked out a lot of usable hours.

But now, the initial routes are ready and the smoothing can happen at our leisure. I have the list of pipe to buy, and the drip system doesn’t require plumbing or electrical work to get us up and running. We’re so much further along than I anticipated! We can lay each circuit independently and won’t really need them until June, so we have tons of time to take this project in small, kind to our back, increments.

So we stared looking elsewhere. First stop was solar. We figured if we could get a good enough amount of sun and put panels on the roof that we’d reduce our energy intake dramatically. If that worked, over time we’d convert everything to electric power reducing costs and impact even further. Unfortunately, that’s out because the roof is East/West facing and wouldn’t get the full day sun it would need to be efficient enough to power much more than a toaster.

So now we’re on to geothermal. Some of the units we saw included returns for hooking up to the hot water tank and reducing that cost as well. I haven’t fully researched how that works, if at all, with a tankless water heater, but the idea is pretty interesting. Why not use that extra heat even more? Makes sense to me.

So we have our first estimate set for Monday. No idea yet if this is something we can afford, or even do with the layout of our house. But we’re going to look into it just the same. Hopefully this is our key to reducing our natural gas usage.

Of course, he also left me with a brain full of rain barrel cisterns, chicken raising ideas and some fantastic ideas for vines to put in the chain link for edible content and beauty. Now I must find a way to fulfill my huge desire to hire someone to put all the pipe in the ground and figure out how to get the water pressure high enough to make the whole thing work. Having 28PSI water pressure is killing us.

I’ve also decided not to worry about getting the starts going – I’m just going to concentrate on the tomatoes. So the transplants will arrive in mid-May ready for dropping in the ground. Now I just have to hope that we don’t have a late cool snap.