Transform Your Backyard with an Elegant She-Shed

Explore effective strategies to keep your greenhouse cool and thriving during the summer season.

The peak of summer brings the best of all worlds for the greenhouse gardener. Early tomatoes, the first zucchini and loads of strawberries. But there is another thing summer brings. The chance to start winter vegetables in your greenhouse.

If you watch old re-runs on Netflix you have seen how fashions and styles have changed dramatically since Seinfeld was filmed in the 1990s. The same is true for food – especially lettuce.

I first wrote about “novel” mesclun greens (mixed lettuce) in 1995. Since then, they have become so popular, that bagged lettuce is the only lettuce most people know. And this is too bad because lettuce greens or bagged greens are really just immature greens like kale and lettuce leaves. So, for something completely novel, why not go back to the future? Grow full-size head lettuce in your Greenhouse Garden this year.

Most people don’t remember life before the small bags of lettuce leaves so commonly sold now at big box stores and local farm markets. But if you want the crunch of lettuce in a BLT sandwich or if you want to replace Pita bread with a Keto-friendly lettuce leaf wrap for lunch, then start growing your own heads of lettuce this season.

The Trouble with Greenhouse Tomatoes

Do your greenhouse tomatoes have heat stroke?

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.

 

Before You Order Seeds for Your Hobby Greenhouse, Read the Fine Print

 

When 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. 

August Plants

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!

Watering Problems?

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.

Benefits of Shade Cloth

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.

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