Another major milestone for the season, checked off the list! We’ve converted our greenhouse from “seedling mode” to summer mode!
We primarily use our greenhouse for tomato production, with 75% of the space allocated for that. Tomatoes are one of those crops where increasing ambient air temperatures makes a major difference in overall production and maturation rates. If there’s one northern crop that benefits most from the greenhouse, tomatoes are at the top of that list.
This year, we’re changing things up quite significantly. We’ve kicked all of our peppers to the outdoors. Previously, we’d grow some peppers in our greenhouse to help them finish out their maturity. Overall, we’ve felt this was like chasing a diminishing return. While yes, we did get a few more mature peppers, it wasn’t worth the incredibly valuable space of the greenhouse. We’re able to get quite acceptable maturation rates outdoors, in containers.
So, in its place, we’ve done something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. Increased cucumber production! This year, we’ll have an entire “wall” of cucumbers and we’re really looking forward to it. We’ve been wanting more cukes for years now, but like with tomatoes, the warm air is essential to great production. We’re trialing two new-to-us varieties, plus an “old reliable” this year and we’ll certainly have more to say on this later. Looking forward to some serious pickling sessions in the future, though!
One of the other crops that belongs in our greenhouse is basil, we grow two different varieties. We’re on the fence with this one, as we know it can do decently well outdoors, in containers. But it does so much better with a bit of heat. We’re (finally) doing a side by side comparison this year to find out, for sure. So, like many other crops we’ve kicked out of our greenhouse, basil might find itself destined for growing outdoors. We’ll see!
And, lastly we’re doing something that is completely inadvisable. We’re growing one single melon plant in here as well. It’s going to get nuts and we have no concrete plan on how we’re going to deal with it. Nonetheless, we’re going to test it out and see how it goes. Oh, and of course we’ll be continuing our outdoor melon trials this year, but we want to hedge our bets this season. More on that later!
We do end up stuffing quite a few plants into our greenhouse, once we have everything we intend to plant, planted. Inevitably, we’ll have some peppers and maybe other plants in here as well. We’ll often stick these wherever we have room, just to maximize our use of space as much as possible. That melon is going to make things interesting this year, though!
Glad to have another garden done for the season. This one’s pretty much on autopilot now, just add fertilizer, water and harvest!
