If you have a good greenhouse, can you grow produce year round?
Yes
If you’re intent on it you can grow some cold hardy greens like lettuce etc. without a greenhouse. This guy lives not far from me I don’t think, same state and zone anyways.
I think he got a lot of his ideas out of this book which I got for xmas last year.
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Season-Harvest-Organic-Vegetables-Edition/dp/1890132276
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That’s really cool.
If you’re going to try to set up a big heated greenhouse with supplemental lighting and grow tomatoes in the winter though good luck, those are going to be some expensive tomatoes.
Well, we’re still in ridiculously sunny Southern California. I was just musing about possible eventual relocation for retirement.
I think that’s what a lot of potential greenhouse growers overlook. Most plants grow and bloom according to hours of daylight. The sun is their own little internal timer. Regardless of how tropical of an environment you create, you’re going to need to invest in supplemental lighting or you’re not going to grow shit.
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With a heated greenhouse, you can reproduce any conditions of temperature and humidity you might want.
The big problem is amount of sunlight. Less than 12 hours a day is just not gonna produce produce. With supplemental UV light, you can correct that, and ‘flicker’ lights are apparently the next thing to magic, but you’re talking a major capital investment at that point.
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I found that out attempting a late season hemp crop. I wanted to leave my plants up for another month as the temps and humidity were still well within grow range. I noticed around the 3rd week of November however that there were no new blooms and existing blooms weren’t getting any more mature. The daylight had dwindled to 10 hours, so it was just time to harvest.
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So DM now that you got stuff squared away with the utility peeps, is your electric improving?
Fukk No! I got my electricity bill yesterday and it went up from $175 a month to $197 a month. Maybe they are trying to punish me for getting snippity on the phone. I mean, it’s the middle of winter and I’m not even running my A/C. Even without Solar my bill should have went down… not up.
I’m going to call them in a few days. I just can’t deal with them all over again right now.
But that bill includes water, right? You’re probably paying more for water.
No, that’s just electricity. I get a separate bill for water, sewage and about 5 other things I guess are related somehow to water. That come’s from a totally different entity. Why? Do you get a combined bill? I think in LA and maybe west of LA it’s all DWP… right?
Yeah. All in one.