For weeks I've been tending little broccoli, cabbage and onion seedlings, dragging them around in their seedling flats, putting them under lights, putting them in the window and then taking them out of the window when the sun's too hot, transplanting them into sawed-off milk cartons (as in picture) and then gradually "hardening the seedlings off" so that in theory they would be ready for today. Today I took them out to the newly prepared garden bed where I had done a soil test to determine whether the soil was dry enough to dig in and then dug in lots of compost that came from the Coors plant (the beer's no good but I'm banking on the compost!) and weeded and set up a little hoop house to warm up the soil just before the most recent snow storm. Today I took half of those little seedlings and planted them and mulched them with straw and tucked them in with a row cover and buttoned up the hoops and plastic with lots of rocks so it would be nice and cozy in there all night.
Cozy right now at 9:16 PM MST, equals 31.5 degrees in the hoop house while outside it's 32-point-something. 40 percent chance of snow's predicted too. Don't worry, it's usually warmer in the hoop house than it is outside. Mere technicality the temperature- really. Tomorrow morning I'll run downstairs to peer at the indoor/outdoor thermometers that we have set up with sensors out under the back deck and in one of the hoop houses (yes, I have two "hoop houses"and yes "they" have proliferated to two recently) and I'll check the minimum temperatures on record for the night. Then I'll go and peer under the plastic and the row cover with my heart in my mouth, fully expecting my tender little seedlings to be frozen stiff.
Oh, what have I done?
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