Our 2024 Garden: sunroom progress

It’s done!

Sort of.

The half of the sun room we use as a greenhouse is now done, and we even have spaces for the cats, several of which have been quite happy with.

Especially Syndol. He loves that baby jail! I did have to add an extra board next to the closet door on the saw horses, though. I found one in the garage, just wide enough, and cut it to match the length of the closet door. The cage is wider than the door, and I didn’t want the cats jumping up on it, like they normally would, as it was a favourite place for some of them to sleep. One sawhorse is angled, to allow access to the shelf at the south window. Unfortunately, that extra board does get in the way, but we can work around it without risking knocking the sawhorse right over!

We’ve started to move more of the heat loving seedlings in, what with the thermometer in there reading almost 30C/86F! It didn’t actually feel quite that hot, though – the ceiling fan certainly helped – so I got out the temperature gun to do some spot checks.

The ceiling was right at 30C/86F, while the floor was 20C/86F! At table height, the temperature ranged from about 24-27C/75-81F, depending on where I aimed the gun. Overnight, we’re supposed to drop to 3C/37F, but the sun room should remain adequately warm.

With the evening sun coming through the West windows, I put the trays on the table for now, then gave them a misting with the hose. In the morning, I will move some onto the shelf in the south facing window. I’ll also bring the two remaining tomato trays. I might leave the onions in the living room, as they prefer cooler temperatures. The Summer of Melons tray could probably be moved, too. The last pot’s seedling showed up today, so all 21 seeds from that packet are now growing. They just have their seed leaves, but melons are heat lovers, so they’ll probably do better in the sun room than even in the aquarium greenhouse.

I was going to work on the other half of the sun room once things starting cooling down, but… well, things haven’t really cooled down, yet. To top it off, instead of getting to sleep early last night, I ended up awake most of the night, and I’m falling asleep at my computer right now. So my daughters will do what they can in there, later on. My older daughter has commissions to work on, but they should be able to get at least some clean up done in there, once things cool down.

As for me, I’m mightily resisting going to bed right now. It’s barely past 6pm, as I’m writing this, so it would end up just being a nap, and that would really mess me up!

I definitely want to try and get an early night and an early morning, though. There’s lots to do out there, before things get hot again. Tomorrow’s high is supposed to be 20C/68F again – and a couple of days from now, we’re looking at possibly 24C/75F, with things cooling down a little bit after that. Looking at the low raised beds this morning is downright depressing. We pull so many rhizomes out of them, every fall, but you’d never know it from all the crab grass popping up in them right now! It’ll be easier, once they get converted to higher raised beds, though some crab grass will still find a way through.

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The Re-Farmer

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