The Greenhouse

I love our greenhouse! Our 1 acre is on a hill. Our house is up high and our growing space is down below where is has a tendency to get very wet in the spring or during a thaw. Because of this we had to raise our greenhouse up a couple feet to make sure it would not be full of water in the spring. This is not so good for insulation in the winter, but it does keep it from floating!

We were inspired by Eliot Coleman and his book Four Season Harvest to put in a greenhouse and two winters ago we had greens almost all winter except for the coldest couple of weeks. I have found that when I use the greenhouse for tomatoes I don’t get greens planted early enough for a winter harvest in here.

We use the double coverage method in the greenhouse to keep the soil warmer.

We used an old movable garage shed for the frame and bought greenhouse plastic to cover it for longevity.

The greenhouse is 12 x 20 with a vent on one end on top and a window and door that open on the other end. The vent and window have automatic openers for when it is hot. It is a very basic greenhouse because we did not put in a fan.

We have drip irrigation, although I would like to rework it to be more efficient. I have grown our tomatoes there for the last several years and this year I am going to give it a break and plant more greens in it as crop rotation is important.

I was able to can as much tomato sauce as we will need this year from those tomatoes as well as lots of salsa. We may fall short on salsa before tomatoes are ripe again this year and this is a year I need to make Ketchup so I will need a lot of tomatoes, I hope our garden is up for the challenge!

I also grew peppers here and was able to freeze several pints to be used in stirfrys etc.

Last year I wintered over leeks in here and they were delicious, we just don’t have storage for them so I would dig them out when it was warm enough and we needed them.

I had some leeks planted in here and some small onions, however some critter (a gopher I think) has been munching the tops. I have been researching ways to get rid of gophers. I haven’t found anything I love, but they have got to go!

How Firehouse Farm Began

Firehouse Farm began when our son A was born. At the time River had very bad eczema and A was having a lot of gas. There was a list of three things that people usually try first with gassy babies if they are nursing; eliminating dairy, gluten and caffeine. I have Celiac Disease so I wasn’t eating any gluten and I didn’t drink coffee and only occasionally indulged in a Starbucks Chai Tea Latte. I tried eliminating dairy and that didn’t have the results I was hoping for. The old adage “You are what you eat” sprang to mind. I was sure that changing what went in our bodies would be beneficial. We were working with a Naturopath at the time and they recommended seeing a kinesiologist, Kim, who could test what we ate and how helpful or harmful each food was to our bodies.

I had a list of things that were upsetting the baby so I stopped eating those and immediately A stopped being so gassy!

When the Kinesiologist got to River, she started testing food and so many things were in the “no” pile that Kim said alright, lets start over and make a list of things you CAN eat. That list was meat, veggies and a little fruit. So no dairy, grains, legumes or sugar of any kind. After a month River’s eczema was gone, we followed this diet religiously for about a year. Finding that River was finally able to tolerate some dairy if it was grass fed and high in fat, so butter and cream only.

River still has to be careful of his sugar and dairy intake as he finds that if he eats too much processed sugar, dairy or gluten he starts to feel itchy.

The biggest hurdle that we faced was the cost of veggies that we considered grown in an environmentally sound way with as few chemicals as possible. We were not eating any fillers so we had to have a lot of other food to fill the gaps in our tummies! This was when having a few things in a small garden, such as beans, peas a few carrots and greans changed to trying to grow as much as we could ourselves. At this time we were already growing a pig and meat chickens as we had decided that we wanted to eat happy meat, chickens and pigs that had access to the outside and were supplemented with a decent non GMO grain.

We also began to try to get as much of our food locally if we couldn’t grow it ourselves. The local farmers market was great and we were able to buy some things in bulk like potatoes that helped lower the cost of veggies. We eat a lot of potatoes, sweet potatoes and squash.

Many of our neighbors have apple trees that produce many more apples then they use and we trade or barter for some yummy apples all from right down the road!

We also have peach trees, a pear tree, and an apple tree that has three varieties of apples grafted on it that we got fruit from last year. We planted a peach, an apricot tree and two plums last spring. One of the plums didn’t make it so we will have to replace it as plums need to have a mate to produce fruit.

We have been growing a majority of our own vegetables since 2014 and growing our own meat since 2012.