I think I need a Greenhouse

If my family wants to eat dinner at our table during the months of March, April & May then they need to get going and build me a greenhouse.  For the last 2 years I've started all my own seeds for my garden and they take over all the space available.  This is what I'm talking about:

What you are looking at are:  84 tomatoes, 51 peppers, 12 broccoli, 12 cabbage, 12 cauliflower, 12 zucchini, 46 cucumbers, 21 watermelons and 19 pumpkins.  All crammed into a teeny-tiny eating nook.  It's my 'seasonal greenhouse'.  Oh, and by the way, it smells like a greenhouse too.

See that cute little curtain made out of vintage fabric on the right?  Behind that is my awesome canning shelf that my hubby built me last year.  Here's a pic of that, just because I love it:

Having that many seedling in my kitchen area is a pain but I don't have to buy any plant starts so it saves us quite a bit of money and that's the whole point, right?  That and I know exactly how the food we harvest from our garden has been raised, from start to finish.  The only other step to conquer now is to start saving our own seeds.  That's my plan for this year since I've bought all open-pollinated seeds.  I'm sure that little adventure will be recorded on here over the next few months and, as with everything that goes on around here, I'm sure it'll be good for a laugh or two.

All of those seedlings are finally outside where they belong.  It took me 9 hours to get the garden put in...here's the progression of work:

First, I had to spread out the unit of compost we added to the garden plot.  I took this pic to send to my hubby at work with the caption "Look at me, I'm driving a tractor and I don't even have a penis.  What am I thinking?!" It's an inside joke and it's freakin' funny...just trust me on this one.  That's our lovely overgrown hog pen in the background behind the blueberries.  

All the compost is spread out here.  I have already made 3 rows of it in the back of the garden and planted 2 rows of beans and a row of peas.  Now to rototill all the rest of the it into the front half of the garden....

And done.  That was easy.  I've finished with the compost and planted a double row of tomatoes.  I trench plant my tomatoes to give them a stronger root system.  This means that I dig a trench about 6-8 inches deep and plant the tomatoes horizontally so that only the top 2 sets of leaves are above ground.  The plants will produce roots all along that long stem that is left above ground when planting normally. Did you catch that part about digging a trench?  3' wide by 50' long and 8 inches deep....yeah, that sucked.

And here is the final result....cue angels singing.  All the seedlings are in the ground and have soaker hoses already laid out for them.  Our well gets really dry in the summer so we have to be stingy with our water.  That's why we use soaker hoses for everything and I have to plan out the garden around that watering system.  But right now we have the other problem since it's been raining almost everyday since I planted.  Literally, today is the first day of no rain in over a week....damn you, mother nature.

So now my kitchen & eating nook are back to normal until next March.  Maybe I'll have a greenhouse by then but I'm not holding my breath...it's pretty low on the list of improvements to do around here.  There's always a huge list of things to do and a not very huge amount of money to do them with so we'll probably have another grow operation in the kitchen next spring.  But hey, on the grand scale of things, it's really not that terrible.