My seeds have germinated. (But not all)

Here you can see the inline vent fan.

I added a little electric heater to keep things a little warmer for the nightshades. The little orange thing in the picture is the thermostat. It turns the vent fan on at 78 and off at 70.

This shows the temperature at ground level.

After 19 days the soil temp at 4 inches is 95 degrees.

 As you can see I have had good germination. The chard, scallions, pimiento peppers, tomatoes, and egg plant have done the best. I am running the air temp close to 80 which is causing, so far a failure with the leeks and Cole family plants.  The bed soil temps have run much warmer than I expected. Next year I think I will start about February 15th. That would allow me to run the bed at cooler temps closer to 70. Then later on I could bump things up to 80, or have a separate bed for the night shade heat loving plants. The outdoor soil temperature is 31 and next week we should get a night of 18 . I am still covering it at night with a blanket and it looks like the night temp inside drops to about 65. So far purchased tomato seeds have not sprouted, but the ones I have saved have done great.

Tweaking my Hot Bed

I had to make a few adjustments today. We had a lot of rain over the week end, and the weight of the accumulated rain pulled some of the plastic loose, so I cut some boards to better support the insulated blanket It is very cloudy with highs of about 35 degrees until Thursday. With the bed covered with the blanket the soil temperature at soil surface was 60 degrees, a little cool for tomatoes and peppers. Since I am not getting any solar support I placed a small space heater inside, which raised the temperature about 10 degrees.

Hotbed/Hothouse progress

We have an ice storm coming and I wanted to build the hotbed structure before the lumber got covered with ice and snow. Right now the ground is dry here but it was about 25 degrees outside. The official soil temperature is 26 degrees, and next week it is supposed to be pretty cold. I covered both sides of the windows with plastic to have an insulation layer. I still want to run electricity to it, and have a vent fan to keep it from overheating, and a little electric heater for back up heat. I have an insulated blanket to cover it on real cold days or nights. The insulated blanket is what concrete workers use. About February 26th is when I want to fill it with manure and soil.

My hotbed plants.

I started these plants in my manure powered hotbed about march 1st. So about seven weeks ago. All in all I had really good germination with about everything. The exceptions were with older seed, which affected the onions and some of the Cole plants. We had the warmest month of march in history, which apparently helped the peppers, as I had very good germination with them. The tomatoes have done very well also. The bed is four feet wide, and next year I am going to narrow it to three feet, to make it easier to manage. Yesterday I sowed eggplant, which I overlooked earlier, some black carrots from Turkey, Thunbergia, Evergreen onions, and various beets for a second crop. I think with this bed, I can start plants all summer long. I'm thinking about starting my melons and cucumbers in here as well, in peat pots. It sure beats plants all over the house, and they are used to the sun as well. Several days ago I transplanted in the bed leeks and celery.

A few modifications to my hotbed.

For whatever reason the manure isnt heating up. It's been pretty cold, snow, and one night it was 16 degrees F. My soil temps were a steady 40 degrees. I bought a small electric heater and an insulated blanket that concrete workers use. At night I cover the bed with foam board and the blanket. The soil temp has come up to 60 degrees and the air temp in the upper 80's by day. I have a row of Iceberg lettuce that came up yesterday.

Garden Hotbed with sash

So here is what I ended up with at the end of the day. It doesnt look real pretty, but it should serve it's purpose. I bought two of the sash for five dollars each, some body gave me one, and I had some plexiglass and made one for about $15 . The bundle of foam cost $18. So its more or less a $35 dollar project. The picture doesn't show it very well, but the sash slope away from the shed.  Yesterday was the second day and I put a thermometer in the soil. It said it was 30 degrees, which was a little disappointing. This morning it read 30 again, but it got down to 18 degrees last night. I am covering the sash at night with more sheets of foam. Today was sunny and at 5pm the thermometer read 60 degrees.  Im hoping this shows the manure is starting to heat up,because the probe was down about four inches, and even though it was sunny, it was only about 25 degrees and I don"t think the sun alone would have heated up the soil to that depth. I am hoping I can plant my first seeds tomorrow afternoon. I want to plant celery, celeriac, peppers and a few others that grow slowly. I think I'll wait till about the middle of March for the Tomatoes. I think it would be best if all the sash were made of wood. Also the plexiglass is relly nice to work with, but it's probably expensive in big sheets. My bed is four feet wide but three is probably better. Its probably best to round up the sash or old storm windows and the size your bed accordingly.

Getting the Hotbed ready for the windows.

I sprinkled the soil to wet it, and then I mixed up some subsoil clay, type S lime, and manure to make a primitive cement or mortar. I had thought about throwing some Portland cement in, but didn't have any. I was really trying to spend as little money as possible. The purpose of the cement is to seal up and slope the ends. This whole bed is on the south side of a garage, which blocks it nicely from the North and the wind.

My home made sieve and the sifting process.

I read that you should run your soil through a sieve to prepare the seed bed. I bought a three foot long piece of hardware cloth "1/4 inch holes", and then with roofing nails nailed it to the two by fours. Then with last years soil I tried to run it through the screen. This part was really tedious, mainly because the soil was wet and really didn't go through very freely. I had a nice pair of rubber gloves and worked it back and forth with my hands. You can see what didn't pass through. The soil that did was really nice, and should work well for the real small seeds I want to plant. This part was real tedious and time consuming. After I was about half done filling over the manure with 4-5 inches of dirt, I had to give up and used the unsieved soil, which will work fine, I suspect down the road a bit.