Erie Construction, Co Blog

By: Katie Collins

For those of you looking to expand your gardening hobby, or those of you that wish to grow fruits, vegetables, or flowers in a climate that typically makes growing difficult, greenhouse gardening may be the hobby for you. Greenhouse vegetable gardening is becoming growing in popularity as greenhouses are now very economical, available in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and can allow you to enjoy gardening in even the smallest of locations all year long.

What Is a Greenhouse?

A greenhouse is simply a structure with a glass, or perhaps a plastic roof, and also generally has glass or plastic walls as well. When located in a sunlit location the solar radiation heats the structure and the air warmed in this manner is retained in the building. The glass used works as a selective transmission medium for different spectral frequencies, which has the effect of trapping the energy within, which in effect heats both the plants and the ground inside. Greenhouses thus work by trapping electromagnetic radiation and preventing convection. These types of structures are often referred to as cold frames.

Common Greenhouse Uses for the Gardening Enthusiast

If you live in an area that supports summer gardening with fruits and vegetables, a greenhouse offers you a way to get a jumpstart on your spring growing. By starting your seeds or seedlings while it’s still cold outside you can later transplant these already growing plants when the weather permits. This therefore allows you to begin harvesting your produce or enjoying your flowers much earlier in the season than otherwise would be allowable.

Also, depending on how much sunlight you typically recieve in winter months you can continue to grow produce and flowers throughout the winter. This provides a year-round source of selected produce such as tomatoes. In addition, a full blooming flower garden is quite a beautiful treat and spirit lifter in the dead of winter.

Types of Hobby Greenhouses

Greenhouses come in a vast variety of shapes and sizes and are available in mental frames, wood frames and plastic frames. There are also a vast number of accessories and supplies that can be purchased along with the greenhouse. Basically your only limitations will be the amount of space that can be allocated for your greenhouse and how much you want to spend.

A good place for beginners to start is an attached greenhouse. This structure literally attaches to your home, garage or perhaps a shed via an outside wall. The advantages of this type of structure is the ability to get to the greenhouse anytime of day or night without having to go outside, as well as the ability to share some of the heat and electricity from your house or garage. The main problem with an attached greenhouse is often the ability to place it on a wall that gets the right amount of sunlight needed to grow your plants.

By: Dave Truman

For anyone accustomed to the notion that a vegetable garden must be a fairly large affair - its rows stretching fifteen or twenty feet at a minimum, the concept of crops pushing up from a small container or appearing to burst the bonds of a tiny patch of ground only a few feet square - it is almost unsettling. Yet growing vegetables in cramped spaces is not only possible but highly rewarding. One can grow tomatoes in tubs at the edge of a patio, strawberries in empty milk cartons on a windowsill, lettuce in a modest window box, watermelons along a strip beside a driveway or beans on a trellis on a small apartment balcony.

A year-long harvest of several kinds of vegetables can be gained from a single area no wider than a card table. To achieve this kind of bounty in lap-sized spaces it is necessary merely to provide the right growing conditions and to purchase seed varieties that are appropriate for small-scale circumstances. Luckily a number of seed companies have responded to the newly recognized demand for miniature or compact plants, and more new strains are being offered to the public every year, often grouped together under such headings as “space savers,” “space misers” or “midgets.”

Producing vegetables on a reduced scale, however, is basically a different proposition from other kinds of gardening. Small gardens devoted to woody ornamentals like dwarf conifers, rhododendrons or heathers or to miniature bulbs or alpines are arranged and managed largely for appearance: they exist to be decorative, to please the eye. Vegetables are most often grown to reward not the eye but the palate. So while corn stalks and bean bushes can make the mouth water they rarely make the eye pop, and they are not likely to be found gracing a well designed border, although creative horticulturists have combined a few of the handsomest vegetables with flowering plants to good effect.

The greatest difficulties are practical ones. Although the leafy greens, like lettuce, can do fairly well on only four hours of direct sunlight a day, any vegetable that produces a fruit (tomatoes, beans, corn and so on) must have a solid eight hours of warming sun or its yields will be disappointing or virtually nonexistent; but that bright light does not benefit dwarf azaleas. Similarly, a friable soil mix, amply fertilized, is desirable in vegetable growing but too heady for many dwarf plants that are expected to stay small. The major problem, however, is presented by the need to turn over the vegetable garden’s soil every year, in effect reconstituting it; such heavy tilling cannot be done in a bed of rock garden plants and perennials. In most cases, a vegetable patch must be sited differently and separated from the conventional small-scale garden.

This said, there is no doubting the fact that the smaller vegetables are worth trying, especially if space for the larger kind is at a premium. It is important to choose, however, the kind of smallness desired, whether it is the fruit or produce itself that will be miniature, or the plant that yields it.