The Greenhouse

I had a 24 x 24 greenhouse built last in October 2011. I also bought a book entitled The Winter Harvest by Eliot Coleman in order to learn how to grow vegetables during the winter here in northern Utah in an unheated greenhouse. Here is what it looked like right after they finished building it:
The Roberts family from Roberts Ranch built it for me. It cost about $2,500. I had previously prepared the spot by leveling it and killing all the weeds and grass that were there. Here is a picture of the inside shortly after it was built. I had begun digging a 3" to 4" layer of the compacted clay soil from the floor area.

I built planters using 2 x 12's and with an additional 6" or so of clay dug out of the bottom of each one, I had roughly 18 inches of good soil depth to work with. The planters were filled with a mixture of about 60% top soil, 20% steer manure and 20% sphagnum peat moss. I also added fertilizer - 4 parts 16-16-8 and 1 part ironite (1 quart per 180 sq feet). Here are a few pictures after I had built and filled the planters.







You'll notice the second covering of plastic over a couple of the planters. This keeps the temperature in those planters up to 5 degrees warmer than the greenhouse temperature in the cold of the winter nights. Another technique I used to raise the temperature in the greenhouse and in the planters at night was water jugs and barrels. I have four 55 gallon water barrels in the greenhouse, the blue barrels in the pictures. I have heard that these larger containers do not work as well as smaller ones. The idea though is that the water heats up during the day and then slowly releases its heat during the night. The more water you can get in the greenhouse, the warmer you can keep it during the night.

In the picture above, you can see the plastic pulled back and my kohlrabi and radishes growing in the middle of December. You will also notice some water jugs. I eventually filled the backside of this planter with water jugs. You will also see black plastic tubing running down the furrows. These were also filled with water. One last thing to notice in the above picture is the cardboard divider half-way down. I used this to perform a temperature experiment. On side had water jugs and tubes, the other side did not. This resulted in about a 2 degree difference at night. In other words, the section with the water jugs and tubes stayed 2 degrees warmer than the side without.

The challenge is to find ways to keep your crops from freezing at night. Obviously there are artificial ways of heating greenhouses, but I wanted to avoid the cost of these and also the dependence upon them. With the water jugs and double plastic covering, I was able to keep the temperature next to the plants up to 14 degrees warmer that the outside temperature. I measured temperatures throughout the month of December. There was a streak of about 12 days where the low temperature in the night was in the teens outside and the greenhouse was always in the 20's. I did measure a few days as low as 21 degrees in the double-covered, water-jugged planter, but everything survived. Of course, during the day, the temperatures are significantly warmer, up to 40 degrees warmer. Even on cloudy/smoggy days, it was at least 25 degrees warmer.

The book I mentioned above The Winter Harvest had many great suggestions, many of which I have talked about already. The other thing I learned from this book was what types of vegetables I could grow in the winter time. They must be cold-hearty vegetables, since temperatures still got down to below freezing inside the greenhouse at night sometimes. The cold-hearty vegetables are the root crops (beets, turnips, carrots, onions, radishes, etc.) as well as the leaf vegetables (lettuce, spinach, celery). I also planted broccoli, kohlrabi, and celery. Everything came up, nothing died due to cold.

Things do grow much slower in the cold weather, but they do grow. Out of everything I planted, the radishes and turnips performed the best in that they grew the quickest. Here is a picture I took today:


Far left - onion (can't see them).
Near left - spinach, lettuces.
Near right - turnip (harvested all) lettuce, beets, carrots, broccoli (bolted to seed).
Far right - radishes, kohlrabi, carrots, celery.

One problem I hope to solve this year is to have onions ready when my other salsa vegetables are ready. Every year my onions are so far behind the rest of my vegetables that I can never use them for salsa making. I have plenty of onions already growing in the greenhouse so they should be ready with the other vegetables this year.

Easily Swayed

I participated in this year's State Republican Convention as a State Delegate. I was among around 3000 such delegates from across the State. It was the first time I have done this. It was very educational and interesting to be a part of it and learn some things about how the political system works. There were a couple of things that stood out to me. Here is one of them.

As delegates, our main job was to select the Republican candidates for a variety of State-wide and National positions, as well as our local US Congressman. This was done in multiple rounds of balloting. There was also some Republican Party business that we participated in.

At one point in the convention, we were in the second or third round of balloting and two people messed up. They cast their ballots incorrectly. We had two ballots to cast and we were supposed to drop both of them in the ballot box. After casting them, our delegate credentials that we wore around our necks were marked as having cast our ballots. This is done to prevent people from cheating and casting more ballots than allowed. Anyway, these two people cast one ballot, got there credentials marked, and then got back in line to cast the second ballot. When they got up to the ballot box, they were denied, since their credentials were already marked.

The current business that we were dealing with in the meeting was interrupted and one of the guys in charge explained what had happened. He said that in order to allow the second ballot to be cast for these two people, we had to vote on it and as a majority override the Republican Party Convention rules. One person spoke in favor of allowing these ballots to be counted explaining that these people were confused, etc. and another person spoke against it, stating that we have rules for a reason and that these people should have been paying better attention. Then we voted by holding our credential card up in the air above our heads. The vast majority voted against the ballots being allowed, so these ballots were "spoiled" and not counted.

10 or 15 minutes later, the same guy in charge interrupted what we were doing and asked us to revisit the issue of these two spoiled ballots. He explained that so-and-so was 73 years old, had come a long way to participate and that it would be a shame to not allow his/her ballot to be counted. The other person was 80 something in a similar situation. They were just confused about how the balloting was supposed to happen. He asked us to have some mercy along with our justice. Something like that.

So after his speech, he called for the vote again. How would you have voted? Well, this time, the vote passed by what appeared to be about 95-99%. I was among just a handful of delegates that still held my credentials above my head voting against it. It's not that I didn't feel bad for these people. I did feel bad for them, but we have rules for a reason. It was more of a "principle of the thing" for me and also the fact that I did not personally know these people. I had no way to judge whether they were being honest. I guess one could argue that one of the rules is that the rules can be overridden by a majority vote in certain situations and that this rule is there for a reason too. I'm sure there are good arguments on both sides of this particular issue.

The real interesting/scary thing to me in all of this, though, is how easily swayed people are. In a matter of 15 minutes, one man with a 2 minute speech changed the votes of 3000 people!

Sacred Grove

Elder Yoshihiko Kikuchi was the visiting General Authority at our Stake Conference on Feb 16-17. What a wonderful man! What a wonderful representative of the Lord Jesus Christ! I was so impressed with his teachings. I was able to listen to him in four separate meetings and it was, well, wonderful! :)

In two of the meetings, the Priesthood Leadership meeting and the General Session, he spoke of creating our own Sacred Grove - a designated place we can come each morning to pray and study - a quiet, calm and peaceful place somewhere in our home. He suggested we get up earlier than we usually do so that we have time to pray and study. He suggested that we comb our hair, brush our teeth, shave, etc., and get ready for the day prior to presenting ourselves to our Heavenly Father in prayer, rather than pajamas and messy hair. He promised us that doing this each morning would change our lives for the better. I have done this the last two mornings and plan to continue. I needed this counsel. We discussed it in our Family Council and all are going to try to do this.

He quoted a couple of scriptures that left an impression upon me:

Doctrine & Covenants 88

63 ^aDraw ^bnear unto me and I will draw near unto you; ^cseek me diligently and ye shall ^dfind me; ask, and ye shall receive; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

64 Whatsoever ye ^aask the Father in my name it shall be given unto you, that is ^bexpedient for you;

The Lord promises to draw near unto us as we draw near unto Him.

Doctrine & Covenants 50

28 But no man is possessor of ^aall things except he be ^bpurified and ^ccleansed from all sin.

29 And if ye are ^apurified and cleansed from all ^bsin, ye shall ^cask whatsoever you will in the name of Jesus and it shall be done.

If we are purified from sin, whatever we shall ask in the name of Jesus shall be done.

Whole wheat bread

I've been making whole wheat bread for a few months now. It's good stuff. For the first little while we used a manual wheat grinder. The kids really loved grinding that wheat by hand (not), but I decided to go ahead and get an electric one. Mom Smith actually gave us one that she didn't use anymore.

Then Jen and I decided to buy a Bosch Bread Mixer. Her aunt Ann Allred suggested it and also gave us a great recipe which is what I've been using for the last couple of months. I've almost gone through an entire 6 gallon bucket of wheat. I still haven't figured out how to make the bread rise more than it does. The loaves are kinda short, but they still taste great.

Jen makes the yummy strawberry and raspberry jam that we put on the bread. Everyone loves it, and I'm glad. I wanted to start using some of our food storage items and get everyone's bodies used to eating whole wheat.

Here is the recipe if you are interested. It's from Aunt Ann:

Add the following ingredients and in the order listed into a Bosch bread mixer not a bread maker!

5 cups hot water (microwave if not hot enough from the tap)

1/2 cup good oil (I use olive oil)

1/2 cup honey (Put honey into measuring cup after the oil and it will slip right out with no mess)

1/2 cup potato flakes or 2 T. potato powder

2 T. gluten flour

2 T. wheat germ

2 T. fresh ground flax

5 cups fresh ground whole wheat flour

2 T. saf-instant yeast (if using regular yeast use 3 T. and it will take much longer to rise)

Start the mixer going if you have not already. I usually pulse the mixer after each addition. But at this point mix it well for a couple of minutes. Then turn off mixer, put on the lid and let sponge for 5 minutes. It will start to rise and look bubbly. Sponging means to let the dry ingredients be absorbed by the liquids ingredients to prevent adding too much flour. Adding too much flour is the number one mistake in bread making.

Remove the lid and add 1 heaping tablespoon salt. Then continue to add an additional 5-6 cups of flour. It varies but until the dough almost pulls away from the sides of the mixing bowl slightly cleaning the bowl. At this point turn the mixer to speed 2 and let it knead for 5 minutes. Stop the mixer and put on the lid and let raise for 5 minutes while you clean up and grease the pans.

Pour a little oil into your hands before gathering up the dough. It will not stick to you and add to the tenderness of the bread. Don't put dough out onto a flour surface like was done in the olden days. Repeat with the oil on hands for each loaf formed. Then proceed to form the loaves and put into the pans to raise for about 10 more minutes. Heat your oven and bake bread at 350 degrees for 30 - 40 minutes until browned well. Every oven bakes a little bit different.

Brush the tops with butter, dump bread from pans and cool and eat or if you prefer, eat while burning hot and let the butter and honey drip down your chin!!

Valentine's Day

I've made it a tradition of mine to buy a single carnation for each of my daughters each Valentine's Day, as well as a bundle of them for Jen. Jen's favorite flower is the carnation. The past couple of years, some other guys have started honing in on my sacred tradition and supplemented the flowers that I have given! Can you believe it! :) Well, we've got a table full of flowers now and everyone's happy.

Jen and I were able to get away for a couple of hours and go to a nice dinner at Johnny Carinos. We did a little shopping after and came home with a new game for the PS2 - American Idol. We played it that evening with the kids and had a fun time. You sing songs using a microphone as the words scroll by. You can see if you are on pitch or not and get judged and all. It's really quite a fun game.

Young Men's Fund Raiser

We had a great fund raiser this evening for the Young Men of the ward. It was a spaghetti dinner, followed by a cake auction. All the young men and young men leaders dressed up in white shirts and ties and cooked and served a great Italian style dinner. It was very well done. One YM leader created an Italian photo-op area - a street in Venice with a great backdrop that he painted, a gondola that you could sit on and a young man dressed up as a gondola "guy".

All the young men, the leaders and those who came to eat were invited to bring any baked goods. They were all auctioned off after dinner. There was also a silent auction for services donated by ward members, things like some dry wall work, Christmas light service, an afternoon out on a boat, reading tutor, babysitting, etc. etc. A number of items were also donated from people's work as well for the silent auction.

It was a fun night and a great idea for a fund raiser. We'll find out Sunday how much they made, but I'm guessing it was a couple thousand dollars. (Update: $3200!) One cake went for $400! - a multi-layer chocolate cake decorated with chocolate covered strawberries. Wow!

Republican Presidential Candidate

I voted for Ron Paul yesterday. I love his desire to get the country and the government back to its Constitutional foundations. I love that he is so different that the other candidates and the way he answers questions during debates, i.e., referring to the constitution.

In the final Republican debate in California prior to Super Tuesday, a question was posed to all the candidates regarding what they would do with regards to the military and the economy. Romney answered first, and then McCain. Both talked a bit about stimulating the economy in one way or another and a bit about how they viewed the military. Ron Paul then said essentially that the Constitution does in fact grant the President of the United States the responsibility as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces but no where does it say anything about the President, or the government at all, being in charge of or responsible for the economy. Why does everyone think that the government is supposed to do stuff to "save" or "prop up" the economy. The economy should be in the hands of the people and the businesses of the country.

Well, I know liberty according to Ron Paul will not make it far in this election, but I sure love his ideas.