Where there's fire, well there's fire.

Things are moving right along here at Deep Rooted. We got another 12 trays of flowers in on Tuesday, and got them all planted this morning. Still working out the kinks as far as getting them done quickly and efficiently, and getting used to the space in the greenhouse, but it's fun and goes pretty quickly with a few people. We're lucky to have plenty of good help, and volunteers. We have just shy of 200 baskets of flowers hanging, and the tomatoes are growing really well.

I've been working on creating a wireless network sensor system using XBee radios to monitor the greenhouses temperature, humidity, soil temp and light. Hopefully CO2 and soil moisture down the road. I haven't really gotten deep into it yet, but have gotten the radios to talk to each other through my computer's serial connection which is pretty fun to watch. We're also planning a house and working on insulating the future retail and storage space.

 The wood stove hasn't been able to keep up with the heat at night with the cold, and we are using a bit of propane to keep her above 55. The stove has seemed to be burning better over all though. Tif and I went up tonight to load the stove, and on our way out she noticed there was no smoke coming out of the chimney, we turned around and there was 2 ish foot flame coming out of the chimney. It looked more like a wood fired kiln then a stove, and we stuck around and took some temperatures to make sure everything was ok. It calmed down after a bit, and probably cleared our chimney out in the process, gave us a little scare though.

Between all this, the other little things, and the cold snap we are in right now we haven't had a lot of free time, and when we have it it's been spent bowling or cooking. Nordic lanes is right between us and the green houses and it's been fun to try and channel the big Lebowski and be calm for a bit. It sounds funny, but it's almost bowling as meditation at this point. We are supposed to be getting a fair amount of snow tonight and tomorrow. I picked up a pair of snowshoes today in anticipation of some free time this weekend to check out more of the beautiful hills here in the driftless.

Getting a little long winded here,

Jimmy