Sweet Local Farm

A Cold House is a greenhouse that relies only on solar energy to create heat. We built our Cold House last summer with four season gardening in mind. In the fall we planted arugula and spinach. We ate that through December and then it stopped growing for the bitter cold months of January and February. Today, we noticed it has begun to grow again and is doing quite well.

Luke and I weeded out the spinach and arugula:

We decided to experiment with early plantings of more spinach, arugula, and radish. So we went to work and prepped the bed:

We saved the seeds from our summer arugula last year. Here is Luke planting those seeds:

I am “tucking in the seeds” or pressing the soil around them:

Watering in our new seeds:

The temperature in the Cold House on this early March day is approximately 53 F. It was about 20 degrees cooler outside, and much more windy.

We had fun getting our hands dirty!

Who needs a grocery store when you’ve got a winter garden! The snow melted a bit so I was able to pull some veggies from the garden. Here is what I harvested today:

Carrots in the snow:

Baby spinach from the greenhouse:

Arugula from the greenhouse:

Kale from outside:

Parsley from the herb spiral:

A couple beets:

A few fat carrots:

A handful of broccoli:

A spring of rosemary and mint also from the herb spiral:

In other news on the farm, the winter birds are here! I’ve counted 7 cardinals, a few bluejays, chickadees, and other birds visiting the feeders. Here is a cardinal:

They gather under the feeder:

It is about 28 degrees out right now and there is snow on the ground. It is really sunny out and our greenhouse has heated to almost 60 degrees. No electricity or fossil fuels required, just free solar power.

I picked this salad for lunch from the greenhouse today: