Ohio Gardener's Greenhouse

The latest addition to the greenhouse is some free grow buckets.  Yesterday we stopped in a local Kroger store and while going by the floral dept I noticed a stack of black plastic buckets. I ask the woman working on the flowers what they do with those buckets, and she said they are free for anyone that wants them. The receive about a dozen of them every day with cut flowers in them, and any of them are taken by closing time, she said, are thrown in the dumpster.  I looked at the buckets and noticed that they have a recycle code of 05 PP on them, which means that they are made out of Polypropylene, which is an FDA-approved food contact plastic. So I grabbed the stack of 10 3-gallon buckets and brought them home.


Today I drilled drain holes in 3 of them them and filled them with new MM, and then planted some Beit Alpha cucumber seeds in them. After ensuring the soil was moist enough, the buckets were covered with plastic wrap to keep the seeds moist until the germinate. Hopefully we'll soon have some cucumbers growing in the greenhouse. 



The grow buckets are filled with new MM



The grow buckets have cucumber seeds planted, and covered with plastic wrap

sanderson wrote:Great score!  

What are the day and night temps inside the greenhouse?

  Amazing the free things that are available to us if we just look around, and are not afraid to ask.

It is set to stay at 60ºF at night, and allowed to get to the low 80's daytime.  I installed a small thermostatically controlled blue flame gas heater to maintain the nighttime temps, and installed a thermostatically controlled fan to pull out the heat if it gets over 80ºF during the peak sun of the day.

cyclonegardener wrote:Do you use any thermal mass?

Some, limited.  I have three black tanks filled with water which heat up when the afternoon sun shines on them, and they maintain that heat well into the night. But, they are not enough to eliminate the supplemental heat from the gas heater.

cyclonegardener wrote:Thanks- That is a great working greenhouse!

Thanks!

It is a evolving, learning, and growing experience!  For the past several years I grew our winter greens in a cold frame using manure buried under the soil to generate heat, and learned a lot about how to grow lettuce and spinach in sub-zero weather. This year we upped the game and added a greenhouse to expand both our winter growing and our spring seed starting. Due to some unexpected delays we were a couple months late in getting it set up, and getting the seeds planted. But, we are now eating fresh lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, bok choy, and Napa cabbage from the greenhouse.

 And, we now know that the greenhouse keeps going at 12 below zero. We broke a 60-year old record for cold temps two days ago, but everything kept growing. I'm still looking at heating and insulating options and capabilities. Don't have room for a compost bin to generate heat, but might add a few more barrels of water.... It will keep evolving.

It is a bright, sunny White Christmas Day, and all is well in the greenhouse.  A balmy 8.9ºF outside, and a warm 68.9ºF inside the greenhouse with the sun warming it up for day.

Today while picking lettuce and spinach in the greenhouse I noticed that the Black Seeded Simpson leaf lettuce is starting to bolt to seed already. That means that the greenhouse has been too warm for the liking of the lettuce.  The chinese cabbage, bok choy, and swiss chard are all doing great though.  And, about 2 weeks ago I started some new Merlot lettuce which is growing great.

The greenhouse has become invaded by pesky little Fungus Gnats.  When I made the MM for the raised bed in the greenhouse I ran out of home made compost, so I picked up some of the free mushroom compost from the local mushroom farm to use in its place.  I suspect those fungus gnats were in that compost, and now the greenhouse is full of them.  Today I made some bright yellow gnat traps to see if I can control their population until I can get some more Neem Cake to make some Neem Tea.

The gnat traps are made out of pieces of a yellow plastic file folder, and then covered with Vaseline for the gnats to stick to.

Got creative in shaping the ones for the hanging baskets.

Soose wrote:"OhioGardener
 at 4 days (?), how did the homemade Vaseline/file folder traps work?  Putting that in my bag of tricks for future.

They work very well at attracting and trapping the annoying Fungus Gnats that are flying everywhere. But, unfortunately, it is somewhat a futile attempt to control the gnats.  A single female Fungus Gnat only lives for one week, but during that time she lays between 200 and 300 eggs on the soil.  Unknown how many eggs she was able to lay before getting caught on the trap, but if only one egg survives to maturity that will result in another 200 to 300 gnats.  That is why I use other tools, such as Neem Cake, as part of my IPM (Integrated Pest Management).

When I have time I am going to make a separate thread under the Pests forum on using Neem Cake and Neem Cake Tea for pest management.

As an example of the success of using yellow sticky pest traps for Fungus Gnats here is a closeup of a few of the gnats.

sanderson wrote:OG,  Thank you for the follow up.  Will it work with any other pests like white flies?

Interesting that you would ask that. The guy that introduced me to Neem Cake Tea has a greenhouse operation for growing bedding plants to sell to local stores. He uses it as a systemic pest control, and says he has never had to deal with Aphids or White Flies since using it.  I have never had White Flies, and have minimal problems with Aphids, so have no personal knowledge of its effectiveness.

The way works against Fungus Gnats is by making the tea and then doing a soil drench once a week for at least three weeks, but preferably 5 weeks. The soil drench kills the larva in the soil, but does not kill the eggs nor the adults that are still flying about. So, the repeated weekly applications are to break the cycle of the gnat - each time it is applied it stops one cycle of the larva.

The concept of the systemic application is that the Neem Cake Tea is applied every 21 days so that the roots absorb the Azadirachtin from the Neem Cake and distribute it throughout its stems and leaves. When an insect such as Aphid or White Fly pierces the leaf to suck out the fluid it gets the Azadirachtin.  This will trick the pest into thinking it’s full, causing it to starve itself. This prevents the adult from laying more eggs, which reduces the population. But, this process must be repeated until there are no more insects.  The good thing is that since it only affects sucking type insects, it will not affect bees, butterflies, ladybugs, and other beneficial insect.

Back in December I started looking at different types of leaf lettuce to grow in the greenhouse.  My favorite leaf lettuce has always been Black Seeded Simpson, but it is a cool weather crop and will start to bolt as soon as weather turns warm. The same thing happened in the greenhouse as soon as the inside temp warmed up the lettuce started to bolt.

I got some Merlot Leaf Lettuce seeds as a free packet with an order from Baker Creek Heirloom, and the packet states that it is bolt resistant. I immediately planted the seeds in the raised bed in the greenhouse to test them.  They have been growing great since Dec 28th and have shown no signs of bolting.  Two separate plantings of the Black Seeded Simpson have bolted during that time.

So far the test with the Merlot Leaf Lettuce has been very successful, and will be ordering more of it with the next seed order to try to grow in the outdoor beds this summer.  It has not only grown very rapidly and produces a lot of salad, but it is delicious as well.

https://www.rareseeds.com/lettuce-merlot

The veggies in the greenhouse are really enjoying the longer days, and brighter sunshine.

Six Napa Cabbage plants

Six Swiss Chard and three Bok Choy plants

Two days in March at the greenhouse.....

The Swiss Chard and Bok Choy are competing to see who gets the most space. There are 6 Swiss Chard, and 3 Bok Choy plants in this 2'x2' section of the raised bed.  Two of the Bok Choy will soon be ready to harvest, and then there will be growth room for the Chard. There are 3 new Bok Choy seedlings growing to the left of these plants, but they didn't get in the picture.  

The first greenhouse cucumber. This is a Beit Alpha Cucumber, which is one of the parthenocarpic varieties that does not need pollination.  It is also a burpless cucumber, which is a plus.

sanderson wrote:With this success, it will be hard to get you out of the greenhouse!  What's next? A tomato?

Hmmmmm.....  That's a thought.  I have all of the tomato, pepper, eggplant, and basil seedlings growing in there right now.