Saturday, March 26, 2016

Indoor Greenhouse

We are starting on our garden early this year, as we are learning to sprout our own seeds. We usually buy the plants from our local greenhouse, but we decided that we wanted to try to keep them alive from seed this year. We have tried this method in years past with poor results, so we really delved into learning how to do it properly. Henry spent a lot of time on YouTube learning about many different growing methods, a few of which we will be trying out and documenting this year. 

For now we are working with our tomato, pepper, cucumber, zucchini, peanuts and kale starts, also making an attempt at sweet corn (you aren't supposed to start these indoors, but we wanted to try anyway to see if we could get it early this year). To help the process we have put together a makeshift greenhouse in our dining room. We started our plants in the middle of February, and they are still alive!  They are growing well, and the greenhouse is having great effects in keeping them healthy. 

We used pvc pipe lengths held on a portable table with pinch clips, we then draped the structure with plastic drop cloth which was left over from painting.  We have a thermometer that also keeps track of the humidity.  We check throughout the day and either open or close the plastic on one side so that we can maintain proper temperature and humidity.

Here are a few pictures. We hope our garden does well this year!