We will move forward, upward, and yes, we will move onward.

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It's not even 7 am yet and I've already loaded the wood stove, made homemade banana nut muffins, coffee, and caught up on some light unemployment law reading and have found myself with a little time to kill before we head back out to the greenhouses. We planted our first flower baskets yesterday and have another shipment coming this week and another big shipment the following week and so on through March so we will be busy planting flowers and arranging baskets for the next month. We fired up one of our wood stoves about a week ago to heat our flower greenhouse. As you can imagine this is quite the challenge in February. After changing out a few pumps, adjusting our schedule, and making a few minor improvements I think we've finally got a pretty good system down and it seems to be keeping the greenhouse around 55 through the wintery Wisconsin nights. During the day it is around 80-90 degrees. Who needs to go to St. John when we've got our own little tropical paradise (well kind of, maybe not quite tropical but definitely becoming lush) here in Southwestern Wisconsin?

 We started our tomatoes on January 29^th, they sprouted in less than a week and two weeks later they are looking GREAT - healthy and strong. We started our seeds in our new Amish friend Menno’s greenhouse which he has had going since the beginning of January. We have 7 varieties and roughly 2,500 tomato plants. We will bring them out to our 2^nd greenhouse in Mid-March and then move many of them to our 3^rd and 4^th greenhouses in April, when the temperatures start to get a little warmer. We try to keep them in our 2^ndgreenhouse as long as possible as we do not have #3 and 4 hooked up to the wood stoves yet, we use a gas heater at night to keep the temperatures up, this will be yet another learning experience, as we are quickly finding that with everything comes a learning curve.

Our lives have pretty much been consumed with work and research. Although, we took a little road trip the beginning of February to Madison for a workshop. We did find sometime for ourselves and enjoyed a nice meal and some good cocktails, as those two things (and many other amenities that we are both used to) are hard to come by here in Westby.  That same weekend there was an annual Ski Jump competition that happens in our backyard (literally), which is always a good time. We also celebrated our year anniversary and Valentines Day, which was oh so romantic! We worked all day and were both passed out before 10pm! All and all I think things are shaping up quite nicely and we’re really looking forward to getting into the production end of things (the fun stuff)!

Onward,
Tif