It’s warmed up quite a bit here in southern Manitoba. Warm enough that it tempted Dave to get out and start cleaning up and thawing out our little greenhouse. The nights are still really cold, around -10C to -20C, but the days are starting to warm up, even a little above the 0C mark. The greenhouse was left really messy last fall when the cold weather set in. We had to work quickly as we had a trip to visit family in southern Ontario planned. We harvested all of the remaining vegetables that were still on the plants, stuffed a bunch of lawn furniture into the greenhouse, and just left it at that.
Since we want to start using the greenhouse as early as possible this season, we have been researching passive heating methods that might be viable for a greenhouse in a climate such as ours in Manitoba. Dave decided to build a compost bin out of an old dog crate and some slab wood to see if we could heat the greenhouse at all with a passive heat generating compost heap. Building the compost bin and filling it up to get things cooking are covered in a video on our Homestead YouTube channel.
Transplanting Crops For Early Greenhouse Harvest
We have number of seedlings started and growing under lights in the house. These plants we hope to grow out to be of a proper size to begin producing food for us in late March/early April, in the greenhouse. Peppers, Kale and some herbs are in the first round of seedlings. That batch of seeds was planted on January 8th and have been growing quickly under the grow lights we set up for them. These needed to be transplanted into 4 inch pots before they got root-bound, and it was also time to get a bunch more seeds into the dirt for the garden. Our entire indoor seed starting setup is broken down and explained in the video as well.