Cleaning up the future driveway continues, now that the snow melted somewhat. Zach came to visit this weekend and chainsawed the large tree trunks into firewood pieces. Lars and Tina could hardly keep up with moving the cut wood and stacking up the brush pieces onto a nice pile for burning later.
We sacrificed our nice dining room to turn it into a makeshift greenhouse, since our “real” greenhouse is not warm enough yet. We set up two folding tables under the windows, plugged in a 10 ft plant heating mat, and then set out the starter boxes. The heat below the boxes (which are placed on a special metal grate) raises the soil temperature to optimal levels for root development.
With the nicer weather, Jeff has been pruning grape vines, and he uses the better shoots for starting new vines. We keep 4 buds per shoot, dip it into plant rooting hormone, and the push each shoot into its own little soil filled tube.
So far, we have about 300 cuttings:
What else is there to do when a late winter storm dumps 7 inches of snow? “Play in the greenhouse of course!” Jeff spent a good part of this afternoon filling our paper tubes with potting soil, which is specially formulated for starting seeds and plants. Getting ready to start some grapes from cuttings … any day now.
Last year we had purchased a small grape starting kit at a trade show – it contained paper tubes, filled with dry starter soil and a crate covered with plastic. We had never done this before, but we did take late cuttings off some concord grapes, and out of the 75 plants we started, about 50 were alive and well by the fall. (Not so sure if they will make it through this rough winter – we’ll have to see). This was not such a difficult task, so our plan is to try the grape propagation on a larger scale. There is a lot of detailed information available on the internet, here is one of the useful sites.
Over the winter we started collecting the cardboard tubes inside paper towels, toilet paper and gift wrap (friends and family helped with this project). This weekend, Jeff and Sam assembled our starter boxes: they used flats that usually hold berry boxes, lined them with heavy plastic, and then stuck the paper tubes as close as possible into the flats. Turns out that each flat holds about 90 of these tubes. They filled up a lot of boxes, with enough tubes for about 800 cuttings!
Fiona turned three years old this week, and she had one of her birthday parties at the farm – on Valentines Day! We were all very excited – well, the ladies and princesses at least were excited – to plan a “tea party”, complete with fancy clothes, lots of necklaces and hats that we decorated during the party. We are all hoping that this is the first of many little girl’s birthday “tea parties”.
We used some of Tina’s demitasse collection for our teacups along with the small bread plates from one of the china sets. Jigglers were served in fancy containers, fruit was arranged on skewers, pretty cookies were served on platters and we had baked an assortment of tiny cupcakes which were decorated with colorful icing.
The room was decorated with streamers and balloons and Samantha turned one of the high chairs into a birthday throne with the help of a lot of satiny fabric and tulle – in shades of pink with a bit of a zebra print accent!
It was such a blast – we all played dress-up, old and young alike – and it was hard to tell who enjoyed it most:
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| Toben and Omi |
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| Rachel enjoys her tea |
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| Tina and Opa |
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| Gracie and Toben |
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| Adelaide models one of the decorated hats |
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| Fiona admires one of her presents: a tiny purse |
