Learned a lot from this forum last year, my first growing season. One of the biggest choices I’ve made was to upgrade the soil I’m using, and picked up a BAS soil kit. I’m a hands-on kind of learner, so just jumped right into the deep end. With what I learned mixing their kit together I made a plan to upgrade all the soil in my greenhouse. Spent a couple months gathering components, mixing and “cooking” my freshly upgraded dirt. Looking forward to this new season to see what my efforts produce. Soil was mixed using equal parts for hydration, compost, and aeration, also added in some minerals, kelp meal mix, and myco to kick things off. Hopefully my girls and my veggies all reap the benefits.
I started a few autoflower seeds in January, had a couple that didn’t sprout, but the Apple Fritter sprouted in only a few days and is already in her forever home out in the greenhouse, and growing like crazy. I started two more seeds, about a week behind the A Fritter, they are also autoflowers, one Blueberry, and one Wedding Cake. Thought I’d do a short spring grow with the autoflowers and I’ll be starting my photos in a couple weeks.
I’ll add to this as the season progresses to help keep track of how it all goes…
How do you combat the heat during the summer in the greenhouse?
I installed two exhaust fans to pull warmer air rising to the top and also installed an evaporative cooler, all on thermostats. It also catches some shade from a large tree toward the hotter part of the day, which helps.
I can keep it 15-20 degrees cooler than the ambient temperature typically. Which, where I live, can still be pretty warm. We hit 110 F last summer. I kept everything watered to help keep roots cool and did pretty well. Did have one plant (autoflower) hermie on me in August during the hottest days. Veggies produced well, but saw some heat stress there too. Always a work in progress…
One of the seeds I dropped, a Wedding Cake auto, sprouted up with a helmet head. I left the seed shell in place, figuring it would eventually come loose, but after several days and losing one of it’s starter leaves, I carefully removed it. The plant was definitely stressed, and starting off slow, but I had to let it continue just to see what happens. Now, about a couple weeks later, my gimp plant has produced a secondary set of starter leaves, and an interesting set of paired leaves as it’s first true leaves. Might have to give it a handicapped parking space in the greenhouse…
I had a shiskaberry do this exactly. It took 2-3 weeks longer than the rest to “grow up” to their size and is still smaller overall than the others. I haven’t flipped them yet but I expect it to end up normal after stretch.
I started a few seeds on Monday from two photo seed strains I have on hand(ilgm Super Skunk and ilgm Gold Leaf). Dropped them into shot glasses of water with a dash of hydrogen peroxide. 6 out of 8 already had healthy tap roots going by this evening, three days later. Each strain had one straggler, so I freshened up the water in each shot glass and set them on a seed warming mat for encouragement. The seeds with tap roots were moved to their starter pots 3/13.