Unity Farm Journal - Second Week of February 2016

Stormaggedon arrived this week.    Heavy, wet snow covered the entire farm like a paste, breaking trees, puncturing holes in the hoop house, and taking out power for more than 100,000 households in Massachusetts, including Unity Farm.

Power failed at 10am on Friday and was restored at 10pm on Sunday.

Three years ago, we installed a 20 kilowatt backup generator, fueled by 6 tanks of propane with the idea that we could run the farm for 2 weeks without grid power.   Kathy and I do not mind the cold, dark, and inconvenience, but the 150 animals at Unity Farm would definitely not do well without water, light and their daily routines.  

The generator powers all the outbuildings - barn, coop, duck/goose house, sheds, and cider house.   When we did the initial wiring, we did not have pigs, so the pig barn was without power for 3 days.   We wrapped the pigs in blankets (really), gave them extra straw, and fed them their favorite snacks, all in an effort to keep them warm.    Their “sweeter heaters” normally keep the pig barn above freezing but without power they had a chilly Friday night at 20F (we have temperature telemetry in each of the animal spaces).   We checked on them frequently and they came through the weekend without a problem.    We’ve already contacted an electrician and we’ll take our own bedroom off the generator if needed to keep the pig barn warm.

The hoop house also is not on the generator.   That was not a problem previously because it is heated by sunlight.  However, now that we’re germinating all our spring seedlings, there is a heat mat that needs power.   I hand carried 300 seedlings up to the house to keep them warm over the weekend.

Other than cold pigs and seedlings, the three day power outage was not a significant problem.    We had water, food, and light everywhere we needed it.   We used the Terex front loader to clear the heavy thick snow.  

I learned a bit about the grid during the restoration process.   Unity Farm is on a lateral from the main line which serves only three customers - two farms to the west of Highway 27 and one farm to the east.   The connection from main to lateral uses a 7000 volt fuse housed in a “fuse door” on a “fuse cutout”.     When the fuse blows, the “fuse door” hangs down from the cutout, indicating an interruption.     Here’s a photo that illustrates the issue

Thanks to Brian from Eversource for teaching me about high voltage grid engineering.  I can now diagnose any local electrical outage problem.

During the outage, the pigs did try to make a break for it, however.   On Saturday, Kathy ran into the house and told me that Hazel (120 pound pig) was running into the forest.   Pigs are incredibly smart and she figured out how to lift a gate off its hinges so she could forage in the woodland.    I grabbed an apple (her favorite food) and she followed me back to the pig barn.   After a quick trip to Home Depot, I outfitted the pig gates with nylon lock nuts.

During the storm, we had 40 mph winds and at 4:30am on Sunday, one of the barn windows blew in - the old sliders on the window frame sheared off.   The dogs raised an alarm and when I got to the barn, I found the window in pieces about 20 feet away from the wall.   I used ten 2.5 inch wood screws to attach a piece of plywood over the window frame, resealing the barn against the storm.  Over the next few weeks, we’ll remove the barn windows and replace all the old sliders.

As part of my Umass course in organic farming management, this week I reflected on the record keeping I do every week on the farm.   Some people use sophisticated digital applications.    Some use spreadsheets.    I use notebooks - see the photo below.  I realize this is very out of character for a technology guy, but I think of the farm as a living laboratory.  What better way to document the daily events than lab notebooks!

This weekend we’ll have temperatures as low as -10F without wind chill.    I was going to plant our peas, beets, and other cold weather crops, but I have a feeling that even in the hoop house, the soil will be frozen solid.    We may spend Valentine’s day in front of a fire, doing our best to keep all the animals, plants and ourselves warm throughout the day.

Embracing the Cloud

As I have written about previously, CIOs across the country are telling me that expectations for IT delivery are at an all time high.    More must be delivered faster, cheaper, and with greater usability.

After a recent EHR rollout, a number of clinicians told me they were disappointed with the project.  I asked them what criteria they used to measure success - their answer was that they hoped to get home an hour earlier,  make more money, and be less stressed.   Sounds good to me!

The cloud does not solve every healthcare IT problem, but does enhance agility, reduce capital expenditures, and enables IT to focus more on optimization than procurement.  Currently I oversee about 250 physical servers in data centers operated by BIDMC and other hospitals.   The lease on the building housing our primary data center expires in a few years.    My belief is that by the time we move, we will not need to build or operate our own data center. We’ll embrace the public cloud.

Many companies talk about moving to the public cloud, but as one attorney recently told me, they have not read the fine print.    Transitioning from your own data center requires careful planning.   Here are a few elements of the journey thus far.

I'll stratify the issues into technical concerns, security concerns, and legal concerns.

At the technical level, what are you buying?  I¹ve classified types of cloud offerings as:

*Infrastructure as a service - your stuff hosted somewhere else
*Platform as a service - your apps running remotely on someone else¹s software development kit
*Software as a service - you are buying transactions run by someone else
*Outcomes as a service - you are a paying for a result to be achieved.  It just happens that technology is part of it

Each of these approaches requires service level agreements (what happens when their technology fails), disaster recovery  plans (what if their cloud is below sea level in New York City and Hurricane Sandy floods it), local replication in case of an internet outage (such as a denial of service attack), and ability to retrieve your data should the hosting arrangement not work out (who owns the data).

Security concerns can be enumerated by an independent audit of the cloud partner.  Do they have a multi-layered defense to protect against hackers?  Do they have physical security in their data centers?  How are their staff trained and what protections against employee misbehavior is in place?  Encrypting data is sometimes seen as a panacea, but if we study the major security breaches of the past year, we'll find that most accesses occurred at the application level, not the data level - encryption of data at rest on servers in data centers would not have helped.

Legal concerns include business associate agreements, indemnification for costs associated with a breach, and clear definitions of roles/responsibilities  so that when something bad happens, it is clear what is to be done by whom and who pays.

Of all of these, the legal concerns are the most difficult to resolve. Many customers will ask cloud vendors for an indemnification clause without a cap - the vendor must cover all costs associated with a breach including third party law suits.   No cloud vendor will sign an agreement without a cap.    What is the current benchmark? The Cloud Council offered this white paper which suggests a cap of 12 months of fees is typical.

What do I suggest?

Get your cloud vendor to sign a business associate agreement that gives them a legal mandate to protect privacy.

Try to negotiate a cap of at least three years of fees.

Try to get your cloud hosting vendor to agree to cover federal fines should the vendor be at fault - the HIPAA Omnibus rule really requires business associates to be accountable in the case of their mistakes.

Try to get your cloud hosting vendor to cover notification costs, credit monitoring costs, and call center costs in the case of a breach.   These can be expensive.

Even with 3 years of fees, federal fines covered, and reporting costs covered, there still may be expenses that go beyond the cap.    Consider cyber-liability insurance for these excess costs.  No cloud vendor will cover everything.

Your legal and compliance departments will be important partners as you have the discussion with Board members and senior management about acceptable risks.

I was recently asked the following question - do you believe that your internal staff can manage operating system patching, network/server/storage configuration, and technical security as well as a cloud hosting company with thousands of employees dedicated to that task? Are you really taking on more risk by moving to the cloud?   Interesting to speculate.

Here¹s a list of milestones for our next two years of cloud migration effort:

1. Move community hospital inpatient services to a single cloud hosted instance of Meditech's mobile web platform (we call the project CommunityONE).

2. Move ambulatory services at several sites to Athena’s cloud including the clinical record, practice management and billing.

3. Use public cloud services such as Amazon for an increasing array of hosting - disaster recovery, development, test, and production.

4. Use cloud hosted apps such as Gmail and Google docs as long as they can be operated securely under a business associate agreement.

5. Use cloud hosting companies such as Dell for infrastructure as a service.

The cloud is the right thing to do and as with any change management activity, there will be a process.   Over the next few weeks, I'll be presenting cloud ideas in many Board and senior management meetings, discussing risks, mitigations, and legal agreements.

Step by step, year by year, we'll get to the point that IT no longer provisions services, but instead procures them from cloud vendors.

Unity Farm Journal - First Week of February 2016

The germination station I built last week has worked fabulously.  500 sprouts of romaine, bibb, boston, greenhouse, and red lettuce are growing rapidly in the heated, moisture retaining, and light controlled spaces.   Here’s what lettuce looks like 3 days after planting!

 I’ll cold harden these plants starting the week of February 14 and I’ll plant them in the hoop house beds the week of February 21.   We have a succession planting schedule for three rounds of planting in 2016 - early lettuce/greens, warm weather vegetables, and late lettuce/greens.

I’ve prepped all the beds in the greenhouse using a 36 inch field rake with 2 inch tines to break up the soil and a flat edge to smooth it for seeding.

 Some have asked how I have learned the various skills needed to run a farm.  My approach to any new field is a mixture of reading, practical experience, and constant iterative improvement.    In 1972 when I was 10 years old, my parents went to law school and I had free time after school.    I went to the Henderson Public Library in Torrance, California  (about a block from our apartment) and started reading at Dewey Decimal 600 and read through to Dewey Decimal 700 (600-699 is Applied Sciences and Technology).   My favorite range was 621.0-621.9 which covers electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and tools.  Using several of those books, I built devices using parts I scavenged from surplus stores in Torrance.   I learned to manage analog modules, digital integrated circuits, and early microprocessor concepts.

Farming is similar.  My farm office contains  books on everything from managing an alpaca in labor to fermenting sauerkraut.   After reading all these books, Kathy and I built infrastructure and began managing the farm operations.

 I made many mistakes and gained the experience that books could not teach.    For example, last weekend I had to trim the pig's toenails.    I used my experience with llamas (and the same tools), but had to master pig relaxation techniques (it involves belly rubs and sleeping in the sun) in order hold and do precision cutting of a pig trotter.    I did cut a little too deeply on one of Tofu’s nails and drew a few drops of blood, but he did not seem to mind.   Lessons learned for next time.

This week we adopted another rooster (our 5th) from  a local family who thought they had a hen but when it started to crow, they knew their neighborhood would object and did not want to surrender the rooster the someone who would eat it.  At our vegan farm, we’re going to run a skilled nursing facility for chickens - they will all live 15 years.    The new rooster has established himself in the pecking order (he’s docile and submits to the alpha rooster) and has his own spot in the coop where he returns every night.

Thus far the snow has been light in 2016.   The Terex snowblower moves 10 tons/hour.  I feel that buying it last year had the same effect as washing your car.   If you wash your car it will rain.  If you buy snow removal gear, it will not snow.  At least the pigs are happy - they do not like snow!

This weekend will be inoculating more mushroom logs, rebuilding some of our pond circulation infrastructure to be more robust in winter, and harvesting carrots/lettuces.  Here’s what the hoop house lettuce beds look like today - fresh greens daily in the middle of winter.

On the Road to Interoperability, Industry Collaboration Drivers Wanted

The following is a guest blog post from Tom Skelton, CEO, Surescripts.     I've asked the leaders of number of health information exchange organizations to write guests posts to inform us about their plans for the next year.  These posts will appear over the next few weeks.

"As exemplified already by these first few weeks of 2016, health IT leaders certainly have a lot on their plates this year. Regulations and standards are changing, value trumps volume, the market is evolving, and the patient is moving to the center. Care providers and technology providers are both trying to keep pace with impending changes to the meaningful use program, as announced in early January, as well as the continued impact of MACRA—the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015--which focuses on cost, quality and clinical improvement as the basis for Medicare reimbursements.

But keep in mind, these regulatory updates must not deter the use nor the development of technology solutions that both meet changing federal objectives and enable quality-driven care management despite them.

Luckily, we can tap into past successes to ensure these patient-centric, value-based priorities become a reality. Consider the evolution of e-prescribing, one of the most successful examples of technology implementation and widespread interoperability to date. In 2004, just four percent of physicians were sending prescriptions electronically. Then came MIPPA and HITECH, in 2008 and 2009 respectively, which incentivized electronic information exchange and introduced penalties for not using technology like e-prescribing. From 2010 to 2012, e-prescribing took off, with the number of transactions doubling in two years and continuing to increase dramatically since then. In 2015, we’re on track to process more than 1.5 billion electronic prescriptions on our nationwide health information network.

Now more than ever, collaboration is arguably one of the most important drivers of market progress. The industry’s use of technical standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), rooted in the use of open APIs and Internet-based information exchange frameworks, has helped improve data exchange and interoperability. But standards and innovation only work when strategy, business models, and mission are aligned. Therefore, it’s critical that we not place all of our bets on a single approach.

Looking back at how far we’ve come, technology providers must apply lessons learned and remain diligent about expanding and improving capabilities going forward. As we continue to find ways to create value, decrease costs, and improve care quality, there are a number of critical areas in which we feel the industry must focus in 2016 and beyond:

Increasing Medication Adherence and Combating Formulary Inefficiencies: Nearly one third of all prescriptions are left unfilled at the pharmacy – many times due to long waits from prior authorization requirements or unforeseen, costly co-pays. But co-pays aren’t the only cost factor. The World Health Organization estimates that 50 percent of patients do not fully adhere to their medication treatment, causing as many as 125,000 premature deaths and billions of dollars in preventable costs.

But when caregivers have digital access to patient-specific cost and coverage information at the point of care, they are able to improve medication adherence and combat issues stemming from inefficient, ineffective formulary and benefits processes. Together with many of our partners, we have convened multiple cross-industry collaborations to improve patient care and experience while driving quality and value into the system from a formulary and benefits perspective. This includes working with our EHR partners, to deliver health-plan generated, patient specific insights directly into provider workflows so that patients have the medication they need, when they need it.

Combating Prescription Fraud and Abuse: In the United States, there are 16,000 deaths from prescription painkillers each year, or nearly 44 each day. By digitizing the prescribing process for controlled substances, prescribers and pharmacists can use technology to combat drug diversion and improve patient safety. And with Vermont becoming the 50th state to legally allow electronic prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS) for all scheduled drugs, prescribers across the nation can now use e-prescribing technology to stomp out fraud and decrease abuse of these highly addictive medications.

Improving Access to Patient Records: Enabling access to patient information in real-time is one of the most important ways that technology can improve care quality and add value. Without this information, providers are essentially jumping into care delivery blindfolded, with patients being the ones who suffer. When providers have electronic access to a patient’s records at the point of care, including critical information like medication history, outcomes are improved and safety is increased. Today, nearly half of all hospitals in the country depend on real-time access to patient medication history data, ultimately saving large 1,000 bed hospitals more than $1 million each year through decreased adverse drug events, prevented patient readmissions, and reduced staff time.

The benefits of digital records access become even greater when solutions are integrated into existing workflows and technologies, and when we can foster collaboration and connectivity where there previously wasn’t any. With EHRs, PBMs, and providers working together to implement solutions like our National Record Locator Service, clinicians can have a fast, easy way to locate patient records, regardless of geography or EHR system, saving time and reducing unnecessary and costly tests or procedures.

Enabling Accountable Care: With knowledge comes power, and the more relevant and actionable the information is, the more accurate and targeted providers can be with their treatment. This knowledge becomes even more urgent when considering changing reimbursement landscape and quality-focused benchmarks of the not-so-distant future, with 30 percent of traditional Medicare payments set to be tied to alternative payment models by the end of 2016 and increasing to 50 percent by the end of 2018.

By combining data from an array of healthcare participants, including pharmacies and PBMs, accountable care entities can reach their quality benchmarks and ensure their providers are operating with the timeliest, most meaningful information possible. This information, when delivered electronically, is ultimately improving population health and helping accountable entities better track and care for their patients.

The key takeaway? Interoperability is a reality for many in health IT today, and quality, efficient patient care is the end goal. We must apply the lessons learned in e-prescribing to broader health information exchange for value-driven care with technology as its foundation. We’ve been committed to connecting healthcare for over a decade, and remain focused on continuing to reduce prices to move critical health information affordably and securely, for the benefit of all who are connected.

By continuing to partner with doctors, pharmacists, software vendors, PBMs and others connected through our nationwide network, we are able to add value that could only otherwise be realized through connections with dozens or hundreds of separate organizations. Collaboration-enabling technologies made possible by a nationwide health information network have a direct impact on patients, by saving lives and improving quality on a massive scale each and every day – all while reducing costs and keeping information exchange private and secure. "

Unity Farm Journal - Fourth Week of January 2016

We’ve passed the coldest part of winter and already our thoughts are focused on the germination of our Spring crops and planning for the growing season ahead.    This week I used the germination station, pictured below, which can produce 360 seedlings at a time using grow lights and heat pads, regardless of the external temperature.    Winter Density lettuce, Romaine, and Japanese Mibuna are now growing. In a few weeks I’ll put them in our newly prepared raised beds.   We’ll also be starting a few other lettuces next week

Bibb (Buttercrunch)
Boston (Nancy)
Greenhouse (Rex)
Red (Rex Cross)
Mache (Vit)

We’ve designed a monthly succession planting schedule to keep the germination flats and hoop house beds full (with crop rotation) all year long.

My Umass homework this week involved reading this article about Farming for Quality of Life Improvement and writing our personal story:

“My wife, daughter, father-in-law and I moved to Unity Farm in Sherborn, MA four years ago.   We had lived in Wellesley, MA for the previous 16 years.     When we originally moved to Wellesley, it was a family oriented place with many modest homes, many young children, and a rural downtown (Diehl’s hardware was the largest business).   Today. Wellesley is filled with exercise studios, Range Rovers, elegant shops, overworked parents, and few modest homes.

Exercise on the farm involves a shovel, not a personal trainer.   Entertainment is rolling in the hay with the pigs, not going shopping.   We have a small delivery van and a front loader, not a  Range Rover.    The amount of financial farm losses we experience every year is minor.

The farm enabled us to create a multi-generational household where everyone lives, works, and plays together.   Although my father-in-law passed away last year, it’s still a place where generations gather and my daughter will be married at the farm this Summer.

To paraphrase the  Visa card commercial - the price of feeding the pigs every year - a few hundred dollars.   The joy of feeding the pigs - priceless.”

We found fresh Bobcat tracks around the treehouse today.    A local television station captured a picture of one of the Unity Farm Bobcats last fall.

The freshly fallen snow looks like a freeway of coyote, bobcat, raccoon, fisher cat, turkey, deer, and fox tracks.

We’re expecting more snow tomorrow.   I’ve found the snowblower attachment for the tractor to be invaluable.  The pigs really do not like snow, so I put them in their barn and used the snowblower to clear their entire paddock during the last snowfall.   The geese do not like the snow since they tend to ski on their webbed feet.

Now that Unity Farm is fully operational, we have quite a rhythm.   Every creature - pig, goose, chicken, guinea, duck, alpaca, llama, dog, and cat has a routine and knows its place in the ecosystem.   Every plant has its season.   The land creates food, shelter, and water flow.   Everything fits together in unity, just as we hoped.

The Senate HELP Committee Draft Legislation

On January 20, Senators Alexander and Murray released the  Bipartisan Senate Health Committee Staff Draft of Bill to Help Improve Health Information Technology for Doctors & Their Patients

Here’s a summary

This is a really important bill.   Why?

It includes legislative changes that will help reshape/evolve Meaningful Use.

You may have seen the recent confusing press about Meaningful Use Stage 3.  CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt tweeted from JP Morgan that Meaningful Use as we know it will end since we’ve lost the hearts and minds of clinicians.

A few days later, Karen DeSalvo and Andy Slavitt posted this blog which suggested Meaningful Use Stage 3 is still in force.

What happened?

Here’s my opinion:

Andy Slavitt is outsider at CMS.  He was being was being very genuine when he said that Meaningful Use has run its course based on what he has heard from stakeholders.   However, there are folks at CMS who want the current path of Meaningful Use to continue.    Also, there are current laws on the books that make change difficult - ARRA/HITECH still applies to hospitals.

MACRA provides a path for eligible professionals to move from the highly prescriptive check boxing of Meaningful Use to  alternative payment models based on outcomes, but providing a path for hospitals requires new legislation.

The HELP Committee draft legislation may provide that path.

It requires HHS to reduce burden, a key point in revising the Meaningful Use construct.  It also enables data collection by a team of caregivers, and accelerates national infrastructure for provider directories and patient identifiers.

It forms a consolidated HIT Policy and Standards Committee, which is very reasonable.  
Policy and technology are two sides of the same coin.    Interoperability requires technology standards supported by governance and data use agreements.     In the past, the Policy Committee and the Standards Committee worked using a waterfall methodology - policies were created and then standards advice was requested.     The notion of one group, chartered to produce policy and technology in parallel, makes sense.

In some ways, the draft legislation echoes the standards harmonization work done by the Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), which I chaired from 2005-2009.     Here's the HITSP charter.

There is only one part of the draft legislation that I think is truly unhelpful - creating a government sponsored rating system  for healthcare information technology.    I cannot think of another industry in which the government provides the “Yelp”-like function.   A better approach is for private companies, such as KLAS to provide the research the market demands.   Last week, the combined HIT Standards and Policy Committees agreed by consensus that the government should NOT  develop and maintain a comparison tool, or expand the Certified Health IT Product List  to serve as a comparison tool.

I will watch this draft bill very closely.    I’m hopeful that Congress will give Andy Slavitt the support he needs to end Meaningful Use as we know it.

Unity Farm Journal- Third Week of January 2016

The farm is covered with snow and it’s 10F.   The yearly 3rd week of January chill has arrived.   The chickens and guineas are roosted in the warm coop.  The ducks and geese are wearing their down jackets, swimming and pretending it’s balmy.   The alpaca are cushed to the ground to avoid the wind chill.  The pigs are asleep in their blankets on hay covered beds in the pig barn.  Who knew that “pig in a blanket” describes a real behavior.   They’ve not yet asked for sheets (remember Orwell’s Animal Farm)

As a first step in my University of Massachusetts Farm Planning, Marketing and Management course, we were asked to formulate our goals based on identifying life priorities from a long list of possibilities.    Here’s my top 5 priorities ranked in order

Family Happiness
Health                      
Collaboration
Intellectual Stimulation    
Freedom/Economic security    

Using these priorities, we were asked to create a personal goal statement.   Here’s mine:

“To focus on family life while maintaining health and serving the community,  constantly learning/experimenting and having the time/economic freedom to continuously improve life processes.    The daily and seasonal rhythm of Unity Farm is the base of operations for all these activities.”

This is complementary to the farm goal statement I developed in 2015 as part of my Backyard Homesteading course.

“Unity Farm provides organic fruits and vegetables for the family and the local community. We have used  sustainable agriculture principles to empower the daily and seasonal rhythm of supporting the plants and animals. We have nurtured the property to be a healthier ecosystem than it has ever been.”

In the next few weeks, we’ll select the farming enterprises we want to pursue based on our personal goals, then develop a formal business plan.   Possible enterprises to model at Unity Farm include

Livestock
Bees (pollinators, queen rearing, honey, mead, honey lager beer)
Guinea fowl (tick control)
Chickens (eggs)
Ducks (eggs)
Earthworms
Geese (watchdogs, weeding)
Llamas/alpacas (fiber)

Forestry
Fuel wood
Fruit trees including fruit products such as Hard Cider
Nut trees
Blueberries
Strawberries
Cane Berries (blackberries, raspberries, etc.)
Grapes

Vegetable Crops
Asparagus
Beans - Jacob’s cattle
Beets - Chioggia and Gold
Broccoli -Belstar
Brussels Sprouts - Doric
Carrots -  Napoli
Cucumber - H19
Eggplant - Littlefinger
Kale - Meadowlark
Lettuce - Winter Density
Peas - Sugar Pod
Peppers - Shishito, Jalapeno
Pumpkin
Spinach - Bloomsdale
Squash - Kabocha, Zucchini
Turnips - Haruke
Tomatoes - Roma

Mushrooms - Shiitake, Oyster, Nameko, Gandoderma, Winecap

Workshops such as llama care, mushroom cultivation, and cider making

One of our most popular products at the moment is the Unity Farm Honey Lager - a 7% beer with 11 pounds of honey per keg and Cascade hops.    We provide the honey but in the past we’ve purchased the hops.   We’ll begin growing our own hops this Spring in the new 12x20 foot hopyard I designed based on the experience of Smith Rock Hop Farm and the engineering techniques I learned while building the zip line.  I placed 15 feet posts, attached 5/16 aircraft cable at the top running east/west and attached 3/16 aircraft cable at the top and bottom running north/south.  We’ll plant Cascade hops  4 feet on center and  on jute tied diagonally between the 3/16 cables.   We’ll expect a reasonable yield in our second and third years after planting.

It’s already time to start planning our 2016 germination schedule.   Warmth loving plants such as peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers and broccoli are germinated a month before planting.    How do you germinate seeds in cold winter?   By heating them.  There are two basic kinds of heating pads
1)  the Hydrofarm which is low wattage and meant for indoor use.  It heats a standard seedling tray about 10-20F  above ambient temperature.  Thermostats are optional
2)  the Redi-Heat which is higher wattage and can heat a tray to 120F.  Thermostats are required.

Standard seedling trays are 11x21 inches and the potting bench I built in the hoop house is 22 inches wide.   We’ve placed a 5 foot Redi-Heat pad on the bench, then placed 5 seedling trays in 5 leakproof trays on top of it.

Each seedling tray can hold 72 1.5 inch blocks of soil in a 6x12 pattern.   You may not be familiar with soil blocking, but it’s common in Europe.   The idea is that you mix 3 parts peat, 2 parts vermiculite, and 2 parts compost with water to form a paste.   Using a soil block tool you create a perfect environment for germination.   Blocks are placed directly into the ground after sprouting using tongs.

This year, our project plan for germinating, planting and harvesting is aligned with the temperatures we’ve experienced in the hoop house, our crop rotation schedule, and succession planting - cold weather vegetables planted in beds that will be occupied by warm weather vegetables.  We’ll be able to get 2-3 yearly harvests from each bed using 4 season gardening techniques.    I try to adopt the best techniques from multiple authors, but for winter New England vegetable growing in hoop houses, there is no better resource than Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Farm

The planting begins soon!