Happenings in the Greenhouse

            As the summer days fade away, darker mornings and chillier winds seem to be gracing our presence, and the Marquette Climbers’ CO-OP is settling into the fall semester. We have a lot of great projects in the works for our home, and we’ll hopefully cover all of them in the weeks and months to come. Join us on our journey and remember that you are always welcome to work with us! Our mission is to help ourselves and others to learn about and live a sustainable lifestyle, and we love having visitors. Seriously.
             One of the larger projects for this year is the re-vamping of our greenhouse! Since the fall of 2014, the greenhouse as been a labor of love; an opportunity for us to grow our own food and be that much more sustainable throughout the year. It has been an all-around learning experience for those involved, and upgrades over time-like ventilation system that was installed early this summer - have made the space more efficient and productive for its intended purpose.
  As we continue to move forward this fall, we've planned and designed a new heated floor system that will enable us to build new grow beds, essentially extending our grow season by at least three months. Visions of food processing through methods of canning and freezing are always ideal, but to regularly incorporate these ideas into our lives we'll simply need a larger volume of food. The extension of the grow season will enable this to happen.
  On September 6th,  with no prior experience on any of our parts, we darned work gloves, scrounged for safety glasses in the basement, rented a jackhammer, and made a day of it. It was grueling labor; the greenhouse was blazing hot, but it was a blast! We all took turns with the jackhammer while others lifted and moved asphalt out of the way. Some of us went to the kitchen to cook food for the masses, and everyone played a role in making the work day smooth and productive. Like most everything we do in the house, the whole experience brought us together through hard work, common goals, and that crazy unique family love we've got for each other. Needless to say, it was a great start to this large project. Check out the pictures below, and feel free to contact us with any questions/suggestions you made have!
Stay tuned for the next installment/update of this project as we move ahead with it in the coming weeks!

Much love from our floor-less greenhouse,

Lydia