Mother's Mini-Manual: Greenhouse Gardening

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Cold frames, hotbeds, and pit greenhouses can be—and often are—used by gardeners solely to protect plants during the winter or to give summer crops an early start in the spring. The structures, however, can also be used to supplement a regular greenhouse when the glassed-in winter garden is simply packed to capacity. Cold frames and their heated counterparts, hotbeds, often serve to house cuttings or to harden off (get them adapted to the outdoor environment) greenhouse plants before they're transplanted to the garden. Depending on climate, these inexpensive mini-greenhouses can also protect crops from fall frosts and shield cabbage, turnips and other hardy vegetables over the winter, thereby freeing space in the main greenhouse for plants that require warmer temperatures. (For more complete information on these supplemental structures and their uses, see "Building a Cold Frame and Hotbed" in Mother Earth News, No. 38, Page 44.)

The pit greenhouse—a sort of expanded cold frame—may also be used to augment the space in a heated greenhouse, but is most often simply filled with plants of its own (plants that thrive under cooler conditions). Whether the pit is completely sunken below the ground's surface or only partially submerged (with its north roof insulated), this "coolhouse" stores its solar heat better and loses it more slowly than greenhouses that are completely above ground. And at those times when the inside temperature of a pit greenhouse drops below 40°F, a small auxiliary heater or a few light bulbs located beneath the benches are usually all that's needed to protect the plants inside, while quilted pads, bags of leaves or other such inexpensive coverings will suffice to insulate the glass at night or on cloudy days. In short, the pit greenhouse is easy to construct, simple to operate and does the job it's designed to do very efficiently.

PLANNING YOUR GREENHOUSE CROP

CLIMATIC TYPES

Every gardener knows that lettuce survives outdoors in much cooler weather than tomatoes (which, when exposed to night temperatures of 60°F or less, begin to drop their blossoms). And everyone knows that daffodils thrive in the chilly days of spring while orchids need a more tropical climate for optimum growth. But this simple fact of life may be easily overlooked in the greenhouse.

Remember that you can't grow all kinds of plants at the same time in the same environment and keep them healthy. Still, a grower who doesn't want to concentrate on crops of just one climatic type can do several things to make his or her greenhouse meet the temperature and humidity requirements of somewhat dissimilar plants.

The easiest (but most expensive) way to accomplish this goal is by simply partitioning the greenhouse and maintaining different environmental conditions in each of the resulting sections. The gardener also can use thermometers to detect warm and cool spots in his greenhouse and then raise or lower plants with varying dispositions to these different areas (for example, by placing cool-loving plants at ground level and growing warm-loving plants on elevated shelves). Or, the grower might feel that it's simply best to adjust his or her planting schedule to coincide with nature's timetable (and save on heating costs at the same time) by cultivating only the plants that survive cooler temperatures throughout the winter and waiting until earlier spring to start plants that need warmer growing conditions.

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