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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.
I called Rodney a year after his greenhouse was installed. I expected him to brag about the size of his tomatoes or the hours he spends sitting and enjoying the beautiful space he created.
August crops are growing so fast that I should have a time-lapse camera to record the speedy growth. It’s a good thing I’m home all month to watch the changes and get the next crops planted and growing. Check out my tips to grow your own food too!
Managing your winter greenhouse with crops coming and going is a bit of an art form, so please bear with me. It involves starting seeds directly in greenhouse soil and also starting seeds in flats on shelves or potting benches.
Hand watering is fun for gardeners. If you are around to get the job done. But a wilted plant is a stressed plant and stressed plants get buggy. I would love to stay home all summer watering my
greenhouse at exactly the right minute but that’s just wishful thinking. The truth is, life gets in the way and instead of tending my tomatoes and pacifying my pak choi with hand watering I seem to travel just when my babies need me.
I’m sitting in my greenhouse sipping a cool drink as I look outside. With the current heatwave this is positively the coolest spot in the garden right now. But it didn’t use to be that way. Scorched leaves, dry soil and wilted, bolting lettuce used to be the norm.
I was just reading about how over-sprayed commercial strawberries area. I was reading this on the same day I was planting up my own greenhouse strawberries!
I had to take a break in the shade. It was over 30 C, the sun was beating down and I was thinking I might be getting heat stroke. So I stepped into my greenhouse to cool down.
Rick cornered Helpful Husband on the 19th hole at the golf course. Rick keeps trying to grow a perfect spring tomato but once again his tomatoes are tall, thin and floppy. He hoped asking Helpful Husband would get the message across to me and it did.
My water wand blew up in the last brutal storm of the season when water froze in my greenhouse. No one was expecting that cold spell but then again we live in a Northern climate and a wintertime greenhouse garden is usually cold. I should have known better.
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