C is for

CEREMONY
A lot has happened in the last month since we built the greenhouse. We planted tomatoes and peppers (hot and sweet bells) right away, confident that the new greenhouse would do it's job to keep everything nice and warm and growing well. The weekend after building it, we had Victor, Marce and family over for a delicious breakfast followed by a Navajo blessing of the greenhouse. Victor performed the ceremony, using our own wedding/ceremonial basket which had been a gift from Melanie and staff when we left Kayenta, as well as several of his own ceremonial items. You can see the whole album here, which somewhat describes the ceremony in the captions (apologies to Victor if I got any of it wrong and/or likely left out some important parts).

Since then, we learned the hard way that a cold frame greenhouse such as ours, does not really keep the plants THAT much warmer than outside on cold nights. So when we had several nights in the low 20's, without covering the plants within, we lost several tomatoes, and stressed a lot of the peppers. BUT now, several weeks later of night-time row covers, and warmer overall temps, we've got several tomatoes coming back that we thought were done.
And, we've planted some other crops in there including beets, carrots, onions, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach and lettuce mix. We've already harvested our first batch of spinach and greens for salad! I also started planting our outdoor garden with many of the same crops, and will follow with more summer and fall crops, like beans, squash, melons in the coming weeks.

[It's been so long since i posted, so I want to just get this up, but I will follow this up with another "C is for" post shortly - and if you need a hint about what other topic C might stand for, let's just say it clucks and lays eggs - and lives in our yard!!!]