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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.
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.
Greenhouse tomato growers are rightfully confused when they see so many kinds of greenhouse tomatoes for sale. Karen Olivier, an independent tomato breeder from the Secret Seed Cartel, estimates there are 20,000 kinds of tomatoes listed right now and she is adding to that number by breeding new tomatoes every year.
A few years back my greenhouse tomato leaves were purple, yellow and spotted. Not all at once, but over time and on different leaves. It was the second year I was growing in my greenhouse and the commercial potting soil I bought was low on phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium. The leaves on the plants were telling me what was going on. And it didn’t look good.
Why I started growing in my Greenhouse Garden a few of my favourite plants stopped working for me. That's what I learned to read the catalog fine print and adapt my shopping for a better hobby greenhouse growing.
Some gardeners wait for the sun to gently warm the soil before they start their garden. Others are impatient.
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