Greenhouse Progress

It’s been a couple of weeks since the greenhouse was installed.

I moved all the various plants I had bought as well as some of the seedlings and other stuff that I was trying to grow into it. I’ve also been trying to move all gardening gear into either the greenhouse or the shed. There isn’t a huge amount of stuff, but it’s nice to be able to win back the use of my kitchen table all the same! One of the downsides to the shutters I got installed last year is that I lost all my inside window sills downstairs except for the kitchen window.

So far I’ve got a combination of fruit, vegetables and herbs in the greenhouse. While the herbs would probably survive outdoors I’m curious to see how well they do under glass. I’ve had mixed experiences with herbs over the last couple of years. So while I’ve no shortage of thyme, I’ve had mixed success with rosemary and basil apparently hates me.

I’ve got a few chilli plants, but I’ve also ordered more from a German supplier. I’m hoping to be able to get a good range of chilli plants that will compensate for the options available in local shops. It’d be nice to be able to follow a recipe that requires a particular type or style of chilli for once!

I found a few vegetables that piqued my interest, so there’s some courgette as well as peppers.

And of course there are tomato plants.

It’d be rude not to have a few! Even since I took that photo about a week ago there’s been some noticeable growth with most of the plants, though I think one or two of them are not happy.

I’ve no idea what I’m doing with the layout of the greenhouse or how I’ll even house the plants in it, but I thought that it made sense at some level to make use of the shelving for planters and pots. The tomatoes seemed to be a good fit for planter bags which I’ve placed directly on the ground. The planter bags are pierced so there should be some drainage.

I’ve got more planter bags for the other side of the greenhouse, but I haven’t worked out what I want to grow in them yet, so they’re sitting on the ground for now. I’ve got quite a few seeds that I could plant eventually but for now I’ve got some more bits and pieces in the propagators you can see in the photo above.

I spent quite a bit of time last week investigating the arduino or raspberry Pi powered solutions for managing a greenhouse. There’s a load of options out there and even somebody like me can probably follow instructions well enough to setup some kind of basic system that would help monitor a variety of metrics.

However I have run into one stumbling block.

Water.

There’s no way to get water pipes into the greenhouse without doing something funky. It’s installed on a concrete base, so I can’t simply shove a pipe under the frame, as I’d have to dig all the way down past the concrete and then back up again on the far side. Not impossible, but definitely not that easy. The other option would be to somehow cut a hole in one of the glass panes and get it in that way? Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20. I probably should have thought about getting water into the greenhouse beforehand. I didn’t. I can’t change that, so now I have to deal with it.

I could, however, do quite a bit around monitoring the environmentals of the greenhouse such as air temperature, moisture levels and other stuff.

I’m not sure if anything will grow or not but it’s keeping me relatively busy messing around with it all in the evenings and at the weekend.

Who’d have thought that I’d be buying these kind of metal bucket planters simply because I think the colours are cool: