New Plant Room

The plant room, formerly known as the basement, is up and running! I love it from the ice cold floor and new storage boxes along the western wall to the super-bright shop lights hanging over the planting bench.

A word about those lights. It is seriously as if we have a spaceship in the basement. You could safely land a plane in the backyard thanks to the light it casts out the window over the snow. We close the blinds at night to reduce the light pollution for the neighbors, but there is still a bright white glow coming from our house until I shut it down about 10 p.m.

The first little blades of grass that will be leeks in six months are just emerging, and I went ahead and started a few basil plants, kale, broccoli, cauliflower and a window box of spinach, lettuces and scallions.

The cold storage boxes are particularly fantastic. This is an experiment to see if we can get a better space for storing squash, potatoes, carrots, beets– the root crops. Anything will be better than what we have now, which is just putting the squash and potatoes in laundry baskets covered with burlap and pushing them under the planting bench.

I put a thermometer on the tile floor in the bottom of the box and so far so good– 42-45 degrees. There’s a little ventilation carved into the front of the boxes, and they’re not exactly airtight along the hinges. I’ll be interested to see what happens next fall in terms of humidity and temp when it is not -5 outside. September/October when the squash and potatoes first come inside will be the real test. The beets and carrots will be in damp sand inside the boxes, providing some of the needed humidity.

Right now I’m still in the wipe-up-every-droplet-of-water stage and trying to keep the bamboo veneer clean. Doing the actual planting in the garage so no soil gets on the new carpet. It will also be interesting to see how this shiny new workspace ages…

For now, it’s happy planting!