Hey guys! So you got a sneak peek of the green house in the last post and saw a picture of what was going on inside. This post is really about what we had to do to get those pretty looking tomatoes you saw.

So just incase you missed the last post, on the left is a pic of the green houses and the right is what the inside. We made 6 beds for a total of 480 plants, so that’s 80  bags per bed.

Then we had to sterilize the soil by cooking it at a very high temperature turning it every 5 minutes for at least 30 mins (you really have to make sure that for the whole 30 mins that fire is burning). The pic on the top is what we used to cook the soil which is basically 2 barrels that have been cut into 2. Pic below is the firewood we used to cook the soil. This method of sterilizing is obviously not very environmentally friendly :-(. Soil solarization would have taken too long…..

Here we are setting up the fire and loading the sand. So it 3 parts sand and 1 part poultry manure in each half barrel.

So we tried 2 methods. Boiling it with water and covering it for around 50 minutes. We did this for only one day of the 11 days we sterilized the soil. We realised that it took way too much time. However it was slightly less stressful because we did not have to stir it as often.

Then we used the dry method, no water …just sand and fire.

Once the soil was cooked and cooled, we bagged it up, ready to load into the green house.

Before loading the bags into the green house we laid plastic mulch to prevent weeds from growing and the treated soil from coming in contact with the untreated soil. Then loaded the sand into the green house.

Once all the bags were loaded we had to fumigate the green house to get rid of all unwanted pests. Looks like we are about to get into our space ship right…lollll. The thing on our nose was make shift I think I forgot the right one at home….

It’s a wrap yo! The whole process took about 2 weeks of back-breaking work. I worked with a pretty good team so it wasn’t as bad :-)Thanks for stopping by…