Thursday, August 4, 2016

Greenhouse Tour and Garden Update

So in case i haven't said it before, i LOVE my greenhouse. It's one of those things i have always wanted, and it totally lives up to my expectation.  It's my happy place, and i really, really love it.


 i was playing around with the video on my phone and thought i'd give you a little greenhouse tour.



Tomatoes in my greenhouse. They are about 8-9 feet tall and completely free of disease. Every year i struggle with tomatoes in the garden. i've had more diseases than i can count. Early blight and Septoria leaf spot are a constant, but i've also had late blight a few times, bacterial canker one year and various leaf molds and other foliage diseases. 



Being able to grow a few (7) tomato plants in my greenhouse has just been amazing. They are in a raised bed along one wall. The greenhouse is 11 foot tall, and the tomatoes have found their way to the roof vent and are escaping the greenhouse. :)  i also have peppers and eggplants growing in the same raised bed and they are all doing fantastic. 


Outside in the garden the eggplants are always attacked by flea beetles. They end up stunted and barely grow. i'm lucky to get one small eggplant off of them. i have three eggplants in my greenhouse and they are loaded with eggplants and blooms. The leaves on some of them are huge! i didn't even know eggplants got that big!!  i can't even express how exciting it is to grow something so effortlessly that i've never been able to grow before.


i use to be able to grow peppers in the garden okay, but the last couple years they have looked stunted and diseased.  i really had no idea what was going on with them. i now believe it may have been a potassium deficiency. We had out soil tested and were very deficient on potassium. 

i've added some potassium supplements to the soil and are hoping to see an improvement on them, but until then i have peppers in the greenhouse that are just exploding with fruits. 

This whole gardening season has felt like a bit of an experiment. i had no idea how growing in the greenhouse would go. i had to play with regulating the temperature. i came out a few times to find the greenhouse temp at 120 degrees! i ended up just putting a fan inside to help lower the temperatures and it worked well.  We added quite a few additives to the gardens, and saw a huge difference in one of the beds.  The other garden still seems to be a little deficient in potassium, we added a slow release (greensand) and think that a quicker release may have been better this year, as the plants are still showing signs of deficiency. 

i definitely feel as though we've learned a lot this year, so even though parts of my garden are still struggling i have a much better grasp on what needs to be done to improve the soil this fall.  




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