Richard Perkins seeds 4,000 leeks and tours his sunken greenhouse built for €1500 with police-station glazing. He uses standardized trays under T5 lights that cost €15 per rack, keeps soil at 15-18°C without constant heating, and follows a crop calendar to time each planting.
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It's the first day of seeding today for the market gardens, which is super exciting, but I wanted to show you the setup we have. It's a bit different from last year, and it's going to be interesting to see how it works for us this year. I'm actually two days late, so I hope Matt forgives me for that, starting with leaks today. Last year, we seeded everything in our living room on the racks. I'll show you in the greenhouse. But at the end of last summer, we finished building this greenhouse that's leaning on the south side of the house here. It's got bulletproof glass from the police station in Stockholm. And like most things we do here at the farm, we built it up super cheap. It costs €1500 to build this. All the wood is damaged, seconds, weather damage. Nothing wrong with it structurally. And all the glazing we got for free. And we bought laker blocks for the. It's sunken into the ground about 80 centimeters. So it's a big improvement for us to be able to grow the seedlings up, not inside our living room. And it's going to be a big challenge learning how this works this year. And we'll have a look inside and I'll explain what I mean. So I've just been seeding the leeks, about 4,000 leeks, which is most of the leeks we'll grow this year. It's a really quick process. We just broadcast measured amount of seeds, about 300 per tray. And then I like to cover it with vermiculite. A lot of people will put a topping of extra potting soil on top, but I like working with vermiculite. It's much quicker and easier and helps retain a good amount of moisture on the surface there in the beginning. Now we're not going to heat it at all. We're just going to, you know, it might delay germination of things like leeks and onions, but it's not really a big problem. We factored that into our crop plan, so it's no big deal for us. We do have the ability to heat it a little bit from the house. You see, up above me here is the. There's a wood stove in that room. That's what heats our whole house. And so that kicks air into here when the temperature gets above a preset amount on the thermostat. We also have a heater in here that we'll get on soon. But most of our early crops, things like leeks, onions, kales that germinate fine in the sort of cooler temperatures, it's about 10 degrees in here. When it gets sunny in here, it goes up to 25, 28 very quickly. So we're going to have to do a lot of monitoring with the ventilation and the doors to work out how to use this space. We haven't put any damp proofing or anything on the side of the house and we don't know if that's a bad idea or not. We're just going to watch that and we have a plan of how to deal with that if it comes to that. A big thing in monitoring this space is going to be ventilation. So we're going to work with the doors that we have as well as top vents that we have up on the ceiling here. And we just see how it goes. You can see how the greenhouse is dug into the ground about 80 centimeters here. And we put a gravel floor in to allow us to use water in here and allow it to drain. Okay. What we have here is all of our light racks. We have three T5 bulbs. And we built all our racks standardized because all the trays we use fit into the dimensions 1 meter 20 by 40 centimeters. And most of our crops go in these 64 cell trays. These are really high quality, rigid trays that we use and I like them a lot because they last many, many years. And you can also carry them full of soil out to the field. They don't bend and break like cheaper plastic ones. Some of our crops that are only in the soil a very short time go in these one. Four, four. That's things like spinach, etc. And then you see the leek trays also fit two per rack. So it's. It works out very ergonomically, you can see. I learned how to do electrics in Thailand, so it's a bit of a higgledy piggledy mess, but it's a low cost, cheap way to do it. These lights are about €15 a rack. If you go out and buy a sort of set of grow lights, it can be up to 10 times that price. It's built in a really simple way that you can use chains to lower the light and you need to play around to get the lights at the right level. We tend to keep them 2 or 3 inches off the plant surface. But what we found is they do kick out fair bit of heat and they can actually, if it's about 10 degrees in the greenhouse, they can keep the soil up at 15, 18 degrees, which is perfect. It really minimizes the heating required to use this space. So we've got to set this space up. Now we're going to move the rackings to get more racks in here because we're going to need a lot more racks. I've just put in the leaks now and you see the seeding starts ramping up soon. And next week we're putting in a lot of the onions and we'll start putting green onions and spinach in. And so this is marking all the seeding dates. It tells me which bed and how many seeds of which variety of crop. And then you see in April it starts to really ramp up and it tells you whether you're seeding in here or direct seeding outside or transplanting or hardening off. So when to take a specific tray to harden it off on its journey outdoors. You see in May, it gets quite busy in June, etc. So this really helps with taking the thinking out of the job. During the season we just follow this and obviously we need to make decisions and change things here and there. But pretty much everything you need to do to run our market garden is contained in this little calendar. And it also goes into two little pocketbooks, one that I keep, one that I give to Matt, the garden manager. So we have a quick reference point and I can just keep an overview on what's going on if I'm not there for any reason. So, simple setup. It's going to be interesting to watch this over the years, see how it goes. We've never used it in this way before, so I just picked up all these modules yesterday and they're from an old tree nursery research plot. But what I liked about them is they were going to scrap and I thought we could use these to build vertical cropping space on the back walls of the greenhouse and in the polytunnel too. And potentially we could double the actual bed space in the polytunnel. I can see it's going to be a bit of a fiddle filling them, but I'm thinking to plant them alternately to allow us to water in between. So it's going to be fun to see what happens with them and just a nice fun thing to do with vertical space to maximize the use of these expensive warm places. So it's still going to be a couple of months till we start really getting active out here on the market gardens on this no dig setup. But if you're interested to follow the farm, click subscribe below. Thanks for watching our videos. See you next time.
