Setting Up Your Greenhouse to Get the Biggest Harvests
You could be a small-scale farmer who wants to reduce the amount of time it takes your vegetables to become ready to harvest so your profits go up. Then again, you could be like a lot of other people who use light deprivation to legally grow cannabis. Either way, it’s nobody’s business why you want to perfect your greenhouse set up the first time around. Greenhouses aren’t hard to customize but you kind of want to know what they’re going to be used for when you start getting them put up. Transparent greenhouses are better for diffusion as they make use of natural light and can be helpful when growing vegetables that need specific amounts of sunlight. By contrast, light deprivation greenhouses keep sunlight out totally and are used in conjunction with artificial light sources. Here’s what you’ll need to get your greenhouse up and going so that your harvests are a good, hearty yield.
Choosing a Greenhouse
Garden greenhouses are a great way to extend the growing season. They allow you to grow plants when outdoor conditions are not optimal or simply too cold for your plants.
Some greenhouses are so small that you can fit them inside of your house, in a small spare room or even a larger sized closet. Some growers even get all of the materials needed to create makeshift greenhouses and try their luck at making custom models.More than likely, you’ll just want to buy a greenhouse that comes from a distributor with construction quality guarantees as you don’t want to come home to a greenhouse that has collapsed on itself. In addition to looking at the size of your greenhouse, you’re going to need to closely examine the materials to see if they are opaque, light reflective, transparent or completely void of any areas that would allow sunlight to come through. Then there’s the entrance to your greenhouse, which could be a flap that closes with Velcro strips or it could be a sealed and well-insulated door.
Thinking Irrigation
Do you want to have to water your plants by hand or are you thinking more about having an irrigation system set up that will water your plants automatically? This is a factor that you have to consider at the same time that you choose a greenhouse. Smaller sized greenhouses don’t generally have room for hoses, spigots, and advanced irrigation systems, and if anything were to leak it would lead to massive flooding inside of your house. Then again, you may be better off watering your plants by hand if you’re only going to have a couple of geraniums and a few planters full of basil. Just make sure that you have a greenhouse and irrigation system that works well together.
Nutrients and Supplements
All plants need nutrients, and most of them get all that they require from the soil they’re planted in, natural sunlight, and good old purified water. Depending on what you’re growing, you might need to increase your plant’s nutrient levels with supplements or more concentrated forms of sunlight. Light deprivation greenhouses make it so that plants are able to get concentrated levels of light for 24 hours straight. This will help you in growing your plants faster and larger if you are looking to cut the time between harvests.
Arranging Your Plants
Just as you should organize your plants strategically within a traditional garden, you need to put some thought into plant placement when growing inside of a greenhouse. All plants need to be spaced so that they can be watered evenly and get access to light. In other words, if you place them too close together, one plant is going to hog the light and naturally get big while the other plant becomes sickly and wilted. If you put more than one variety of plant in the same planter, you may want to choose types that require different nutrients. This way they can all get what they need from the soil and you get to harvest when they’re ready.
A small greenhouse can be used to turn out harvest after harvest, year after year, without any expensive additions or modifications if you set up everything intelligently in the beginning. By contrast, a larger greenhouse can be utilized to have consistent harvesting, making it possible for you to stay in a constant cycle of growing and harvesting. Know how you want to use your greenhouse and what you’ll be growing inside of it so that the setup takes little time. Not only will your plants benefit from it, you’ll have more time to spend with your plants making them as happy and healthy as humanly possible.
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