Friday, February 7, 2014

Stay Brave, Greenhouse Owners.

It doesn't seem possible when the monster heating bill just arrived and you've spent more time stuck on frozen roads than breathing fresh air.  This is the challenging part of owning a greenhouse.  Intellectually, obviously, Spring will arrive.  But the wait is long and lonely and so full of work with no reward in sight.  Customers rarely see this part.  The scary, up-to-the-eyeballs debt where everything is hocked and more invoices are arriving, thirty days net.  Then employees have to be paid.  I don't miss it.  Glad I sold that job to somebody else.

But there is a warmth in the humid greenhouse that can't be replicated with simple heat.  That warmth is probably...
the thing that has kept me from getting a real job: the kind where you don't go broke if you take a sick day, office supplies are provided, somebody pays you to take a vacation and there is a mystical retirement account hanging in cyberspace, waiting for you.

Then there is the empty greenhouse table that glares and screams like a teenager, "Give me some plants!!  You are paying for this heated space!"  

Stay brave greenhouse owners.  A couple pretty days soon will bring out the plant junkies to fondle and sniff your basil.  They'll know it's not time to plant, but they will buy a couple dollars worth anyway, to set on their desks at those jobs with the retirement accounts.  

Then that stuff you never composted last year will sprout back out of the little containers it's still in.  You can sprinkle it with fertilizer and bring it into the warm greenhouse.  It will bring in an extra hundred dollars to offset the two thousand you lost when the thyme got botrytis.

Spring is coming.  Really.  

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