This is Suzy’s greenhouse three weeks ago.
You can see the big masses that make this a passive solar structure–the solid earth beds, the water tank filled with waterlilies and goldfish, and the adobe wall all absorb heat during the day and release it at night. There are still stray piles of snow outside, but after three weeks the greenhouse is busting out.
It has been chilly at night, so some of the tomatoes are still very petite
but some of the hardier starts are looking positively beefy.
These are all heirloom varieties, plants that were domesticated ages ago and refined by our great great greats. They are gifts of our ancestors.
So many different kinds of food, so many imaginations. Those two flats of leeks at the top of the photo–sheer whimsy! to start like a thread in the air. And each plant has a story. I planted Giant Musselburgh Leeks, an old Scottish variety that was introduced to the US in the early 1800s. Enormous and tender, it stands winter well and is a good buncher (or so they say). And those leeks aren’t two inches high and I’m thinking Rob Roy could’ve eaten those very same leeks in 1700s Scotland.
But alas, Rob Roy is far less dashing than Liam Neeson.
Robert Burns was a Scotsman from the 1700s who might have eaten my leeks,
but he looks like he didn’t eat enough leeks. I had to go back all the way to William Wallace in the early 1300s before I found the face that looked like it could’ve been fed by Scotland’s Giant Musselburgh leeks.
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