Low-tech transplant production

 We talk of building a greenhouse someday.  For our 17 years of farming, though, we've done without.  Maybe it's because the way we start transplants works good enough, is affordable, and is the low-tech homegrown way we strive for on our farm.  (Or maybe that's just what we tell ourselves because we don't know any better.)  Here's an overview:

 

Seeds are started in open plastic flats filled with our composted cow manure/sawdust near a south facing window (but not altogether even in the light of that window) in an upstairs room that gets warmer than the rest of the house.

Once the seeds germinate, they are moved out to our freezer cold frames for sunlight.  There is a wooden frame in each freezer that the flats rest on, bringing them closer to the top.  Below the flats are square 4 gallon buckets filled with water to provide extra thermal mass for buffering nighttime temperature swings. 

  While the freezer cold frames work really well to keep the seedlings warm during the day and comfortable at night when they're closed, we've learned a few things over the years.  First, we need to be around to adjust as needed.  If the sun suddenly pokes through on an otherwise overcast day, the glass needs to be moved to give some ventilation or the temperature can quickly rise too high.  Since the plants are sitting so close to the glass, there's not much temperature buffer once it gets sunny.  On windy days, it can be a bit tricky to balance enough ventilation without the plants getting too much air movement.
 Unlike the first freezer in the picture above, we think it's best to saw through the freezer hinges and completely remove the lid.  Otherwise, the underside of the lid, which is plastic, will degrade in the sun and fall apart prematurely.

 

   After the plants in flats get big enough, we transplant the cold tolerant ones (like lettuce, cabbage, chard, etc.) into our nursery bed.  This is simply a temporary -- we move our nursery bed around from year to year --  cinder block raised bed in the garden.  Storm windows are taken on and off to provide extra heat as needed.  And on really cold nights, the beds are also covered with blankets.  We also direct seed the same crops into the nursery beds for a later succession of plants.

  Once the plants are big enough, the plants are simply dug up bare root and moved to the garden.  The best part of nursery beds is that the plants can be held until they are needed.  And if it ends up we have more plants than we need, then the small leaves of some of the crops can be harvested for salad greens directly from the nursery bed.

 

  

 

  Another nursery bed that has worked really well for us is our onion bed.  Onion seeds are planted in the fall and the glass is kept on all winter (with special attention to make sure ice and snow don't break the glass.)  By mid-March, the onion plants are pencil sized and ready to be set out.  We also use a nursery bed like this to start our sweet potato plants, except we fill the whole bed with sawdust instead of planting into the soil.

 

  For less cold tolerant transplants, like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and a miscellaneous overflow of other plants in flats and pots, we have a cold frame on the south side of our house.  On the coldest nights, we cover the glass with blankets.
  We're no experts on this and are still figuring things out, but this is an evolving system that we're using 17 years into our very small-scale but full-time farm.  It's a very low-cost, low energy system built largely around reused materials (storm windows, broken freezers, cinder blocks...) that we've mostly gotten through free stuff ads on the internet.