Greetings, farm friends!

We’re loving this week’s cool, sunny weather. Days with temperatures in the 70’s just feel a whole lot more approachable than when it pushes into the 80’s and 90’s. We’ll take lovely spring weather for as long as we can! The fields are finally dry enough to work in, and we’ve been able to make a big push to get beds prepped and planted this week. After weeks of feeling behind on our spring field work, we finally managed to catch up! The farm is in top notch shape now, with seedlings planted, fields weeded, mature plants staked and netted, and we even had the opportunity to clean up in the high tunnels. We were a bit panicked that we’d never catch up, but now we’re able to breathe a sigh of relief. The hardest weeks of spring are behind us and we can settle into our seasonal groove.

I spent the day working in the greenhouse (or as my partner calls it, the seedling sauna), and I thought I’d share a bit about our greenhouse setup and how we grow seedlings. Our greenhouse is a simple structure, and we don’t heat the air like many growers do. Rather, we have electricity in the space and use plug-in heat mats to warm the seedling trays. We keep the heat mats plugged in from January through late May or early June, whenever nighttime temperatures are warm enough that our summer seedlings will germinate evenly off of heat.

During the colder months, we cover the seedling trays with humidity domes overnight and each greenhouse bed has a low tunnel with one layer of row cover and a second layer of plastic to cover the plants at night. Our greenhouse beds are low to the ground, about a foot high and filled with densely packed sand and rocks. We lay the heat mats on top and that’s where everything grows! The heat mats plug into thermostats, and we have fans on automated timers that run through the day to keep air flowing. We’re hoping, in the near future, to install automated roll up sides on the tunnels, but for now we manually roll the sides up when it’s warm and close them when it’s cold. Our watering is all manual as well. We tried an automated system years ago, but it just didn’t water evenly enough for our liking. For the most part our greenhouse works perfectly for our circumstances, and it’s a great example of how you can build a greenhouse that doesn’t require heating the air.

When we seed, we generally seed into 128 cell trays or 72 cell trays. We use seedling soil from Vermont Compost, and depending on what we’re seeding we either cover the trays with fine vermiculite when we finish, or nothing at all if the seed needs light to germinate. I make a crop plan in December, and we live and die by the crop plant through the season. Everything that happens in the greenhouse is critical to our success during the year, and so it’s important that we have close eyes on what’s happening in there. Fortunately, we’re often able to call on our friends at Sharp’s Farm when something goes terribly awry, such as mice eating two trays of snapdragons this week! Over the course of the year, we produce hundreds of trays of seedlings for our farm and for our seedling sales.

We’re at the Baltimore Farmers Market this Sunday, June 2nd from 7:00- 12:00!

We’re planning to bring bouquets, foxglove, poppies, peonies, ranunculus, snapdragons, veronica and Two Boots merch.

And, of course, the Build Your Own Bouquet bar is back!

Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you at the market!

Amelia & The Two Boots crew

A visit to the seedling sauna