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Donna Balzer is a garden expert, a regular guest on CBC radio and host is internationally aired "Bugs & Blooms" on HGTV. For more great tips from Donna, visit www.donnabalzer.com. You can also read Donna’s gardening books: No Guff Vegetable Gardening with Steven Biggs and keep track of your success with her Gardener’s Gratitude Journal: Part Diary, Part Personal Growing Guide.
When I moved homes and built a new greenhouse, I was in for quite a surprise. The natural soil on my new lot is sand. Pure, yellow sand. This means it drains really well. It also means it does not hold nutrients to feed my plants.
Showing off my arugula (also known as rocket) on Instagram leads to a lot of questions about my greenhouse and what I currently have growing.
Nature hates a gap. That’s why weeds fill in every nook and cranny available to them outdoors. Sprinkling desirable seeds outside as the snow thaws on the south side of your home or Greenhouse Garden this spring lets you copy nature’s best efforts. Inside your greenhouse, scatter seeds on top of pots or flats. A light dusting of soil and a sheet of glass laid flat over trays keeps the humidity high until the seeds grow.
The doorbell rings and the Purolator truck pulls away as I open the door. A shoebox-sized package is waiting on my step: my greenhouse bugs have arrived!
In my region an atmospheric river flooded out roads, rails and farms. This probably seems pretty minor compared to areas affected by cyclones and hurricanes but one thing is certain: there has never been a better time to own a greenhouse.
I close my eyes as I bask in the sun, heat on my face. I take off my jacket and then my hat. My neighbors, friends and family have gone away to Martinique, Belize and Spain but I am experiencing the best holiday. I am sitting in the sun at home – in my Greenhouse Garden.
If your tomato blooms are bending and falling off, flower and all, they are having a heatstroke. When extreme heat hits, greenhouse tomatoes fail to set fruit even as the leaves keep growing and new blooms appear.
Speckled leaves on my strawberries make me think of spider mites, but I am wrong. When I tap a leaf with tell-tale speckled leaves, I catch three white immature thrips on a piece of paper.
Thrips move slowly, crawling or sometimes hopping but never really flying. They fall easily on the piece of paper I hold below the leaf. Whiteflies are a brighter white and they fly quickly as soon as a leaf is touched. I do not have whiteflies.
My immature thrips are the size of a 12-point Helvetica lower case “e” on the recycled paper I use to catch them and they are a serious bother on my strawberry plants.
Before we get to greenhouse gardening algae, let's talk about a shopper on Amazon that complained about bugs in her worm castings. If you don’t speak garden lingo yet, worm castings are simply worm poop. They are mixed with soil in garden beds or in pots to make tomatoes grow faster, stronger and healthier. And just in case you missed the memo, worm poop comes with bugs of its own. The good ones.
I am eating a lot of Kale and Bok Choi from my cool Greenhouse Garden right now. The winter-sown spinach is suddenly starting to explode as the days get longer too. There are still a few beets and carrots in the greenhouse and the season of overlapping crops is about to begin. This is a normal life with a greenhouse growing.
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