Enjoy Fresh Veggies in Winter with Greenhouse Vegetable Gardening
Vegetables can be cultivated just about any time of year if you use greenhouse vegetable gardening plans. Growing them in a greenhouse is similar to growing vegetables in the garden in summer. You simply need to take several added measures in order to artificially supply what they would get in a natural situation.
You can use a portable greenhouse two distinct ways. One way is using the cold greenhouse system where the sun heats the greenhouse when it is shining. Nighttime temperatures can go as low as 45 degrees F and beyond that a heating element will maintain that 45 degrees regardless of what the temperature is outside. Plants are merely maintained to be planted outside again in the summer utilizing this system, but they don’t grow. Rosemary is a good example of a plant that will winter over in a cold greenhouse.
Raising vegetables during the winter calls for warmth so the warm method is the one to use here. Garden greenhouses have to maintain a temperature of at least 55 degrees F in order for the plants to grow and require a heating unit. Heating devices can be gas, electric or propane.
Almost any vegetable you can raise outside can be planted in a greenhouse. Nearly every vegetable has a variety that has been hybridized to grow inside. You can find them in most catalogs that sell seeds. The types of seed you want are the ones that don’t require a great deal of heat to grow. You ought to search for varieties that grow small or can be trimmed to be compact because there is not as much space in one of these structures as there is in a garden.
Pollination is one of those things that you will need to do for your plants. Pollinating insects do not exist in greenhouse culture in general so you must do it for them. Pollinating a vegetable isn’t hard. Tomatoes, for instance, should be tied to bamboo stakes and the stakes can be jiggled in the morning and once in the evening in order to pollinate. You’ll have to watch the flowers carefully to find out when you need to do this. When the flower opens and the petals all bend backwards it’s time. You will only have three days to pollinate the tomatoes so take a look each day.
Since there’s not a great deal of sunlight during the wintertime you have to add sunlight by making use of grow lights. Most vegetables require at least eight hours of light a day. Of course, the plants will also need to be watered and fertilized on a regular basis.
Raising vegetables in a greenhouse in the winter may be a somewhat more challenging and time consuming, but the results can be astounding. Just think of going out to the greenhouse mid January and plucking a tomato right off the vine. You’ll have a little taste of summer in the dead of wintertime.
Related Posts
