We are yet again at another major milestone for our 2025 gardens! Our first plants of the season have been fully hardened off and have now spent their first night in our heated greenhouse! It got down to a brisk 23F last night, brrr!
While we were hardening off some of these early plants this last week, we ran into a few difficulties between cold temperatures and snowfall. We had intended to hit this milestone a few days ago, but alas here we are. Remember, all these so called “schedules” in gardening are not precise and you can fully adjust things to your conditions as needed.
Now, the primary reasons we do this so early in the season is three fold. Most importantly, it’s about energy and the cost of that energy. Moving our plants out to our heated greenhouse allows us to turn off some of our indoor grow lights. So, we’re trading where we’re spending money from lighting to heating. As we get more plants into the greenhouse, the energy costs heavily favor our greenhouse over grow lights.
The second reason we do this is about the quality of light. While we have relatively high quality LED based indoor grow lighting to grow our seedlings, the sun is just a far better light source. Both in light intensity and also in light spectrum. Remember, plants have evolved under sunlight, not LED grow lighting!
Lastly, as we increased the size and scale of our gardens, it continued to put pressures on our indoor grow rooms. Having a place to safely put our plants “outside” enabled us to scale up without adding countless growing spaces and more grow lights. In our earlier days, we used micro-greenhouses like we showed you several days ago. These days we’ve just scaled that up to a full size greenhouse.
We’ll be getting into the technical details of our greenhouse soon, but it’s important to know that not all greenhouses can support heating and early season plant growth like this. An unprepared greenhouse can be just as dangerous to your plants (and pocket book!) as putting them outdoors. So, if you have a greenhouse and you’re wanting to use it in the early season like this, be sure to tune in to this next week’s posts.
At this point, our growing cycle basically shifts towards up-potting, immediately hardening off and then getting our plants outdoors as soon as possible! We do hold back those plants need warmth, at least until our overnight temps will support them well!
