Well, it’s starting to look like we might struggle a little bit this season. We’re just not seeing outdoor temperatures truly warm up, which might throw a wrench or five in our plans.
One of our main strategies is to move some of our plants out to our heated greenhouse. We usually start looking at this about early-to-mid April, at least for our cold hardy plants. This helps us free up space in our indoor growing spaces, an essential thing for growing a thousand plus garden starts!
But, we’re still hitting single digit low temperatures and expecting inches of snow. So, it’s just not cost effective to heat. Not to mention, we can’t really start hardening off our plants when it’s snowing or daytime temperatures are flirting with freezing!
What we’re effectively looking at here is whether the cost to heat meets or exceeds the cost of running indoor grow lights. At a certain point, heating becomes less expensive than lighting. We need to see average lows in the 20’s Fahrenheit for that shift to happen.
We’ve seen seasons like this before. The question in our mind is whether the record cold temperatures we saw this winter will translate to an extended, record cold spring?
One of the reasons we added in a second temporary indoor nursery was help us deal with situations exactly like this. Northern spring can be quite variable and entirely unpredictable, seasonality is a finicky thing in the far north. Will it be enough in a record cold spring?
We are two weeks away from seeing a serious bottleneck within our indoor growing spaces. Our ten day forecasts are not yet favorable. We’re debating about preparing further. But, there’s also challenge in riding it out with what we’ve got.
