Four Season Greenhouse thread

[dolmen]

Firstly, I’m far from an expert grower and make many mistakes, a few years back we moved house and I lost my large garden… but I’m in the process of putting up a lean-to greenhouse which gives me a growing bed of 1m x 8m. The climate as we know is quite a mixed bag in the UK, so I’m hoping I can learn to have much greater control of the internal conditions and dont plan on using any additional heat in the winter.

I’ve been trying to make the right decisions regarding equipment but its become such a mine field of opinion that its really going to be difficult, to get it right! Anyhow we have bed built, soil in place and are awaiting the wooden frame in the next week or so … 

The goal of the greenhouse is to grow as much Organic food for two people as possible over the year, it will be triple wall polycarbonate and I will have to look into shade cloth for the summer, not sure yet what irrigation to go with? We eat a lot of salad so I’m guessing that will be our main starting point this Sept/Oct,  hoping to get quite a lot up and running before the days get too short, it may already be getting late, but we’ll have to see how things progress, perhaps a bed of broad beans (sutton) sown to fix some nitro this winter. As its important to grow as much food as possible we probably wont experiement very much, but would love for folks with similar ideas to share their success and failures on a similar venture. I’ve watched Charles’ video quite a few times, along with many others, but there’s surprisingly little actual usuable info out there, so if you’ve learnt anything you’d care to share please shout in, I hate re-inventing things!

Think thats about it for now, cheers.

[charles]

Your planting choices will reflect what you want to eat the most. I would avoid large plants like broad beans as they take up lots of room and do pretty well outside, from November or February sowing. Peas more worth it. Spinach sow now, mostly it is salads to sow now, garlic soon (needs little room), beetroot Boltardy in Feb/Mar etc.

[dolmen]

Thanks Charles, we have no outside space, apart from containers, prefer peas over beans we are trying to grow food stuffs that cost the most to buy organically. Some stuff we could grow but I feel its waisting our very limited growing capacity when it can be purchased quite reasonably.

Do you feel sweet corn would be worth its space or how about mellons next year? perhaps they’re just tempting! but 8m is alot of salad …

Cheers

[charles]

Yes I don’t mean salad all year round, just as the main choice for sowing now, to crop until late April. Sweetcorn worth a go, sow April, read up on spacings etc.

[dolmen]

Thank you

[dolmen]

Hi Charles, I got a lot from this latest video, I liked that it filled in gaps in my knowledge for how to have successional crops coming on in the greenhouse/ PT, I need much info like that, thanks for sharing. I had been covering the salad crops with fleece at night, but have quit that, at least until its closer to freezing, thanks for that info.

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