Greenhouse testing and Raised-bed covers

During the past couple of weeks I’ve been running temperature tests inside of our little greenhouse to see if I could start putting some plants inside while the snow is still flying. While data logger was running inside the greenhouse, I was outside doing some cleaning up of the raised beds. I found that we’ve had some very destructive bunnies in our gardens! Luckily rabbit manure is a ‘cold’ manure, meaning it won’t burn the plants if put directly into the garden. Other manures like chicken and horse are ‘hot’ and need to be composted before going into the garden otherwise they can stunt or burn your plants. So, after clearing out the old plants from last year I covered the beds so hopefully the soil will warm up more, the plant material will break down some, and we’ll be ready to plant in a few weeks.

The temperature results from the data logger inside the greenhouse were interesting. While it was sitting on a shelf the temperature was the same as the outside temperatures at night (in the teens), then would spike to over 100 degrees during the day! I then put the data logger on the ground. There the temperatures stayed above freezing at night, even when outside temperatures were below freezing, and daytime temperatures stayed below 100. Pretty interesting. If I remove some of the shelves and plant directly into the ground I think I could be growing a nice crop of greens right now, even though there is snow everywhere.