Growing plants in the Rockies Greenhouse gardening at 8500ft

Well its been nice living here in the mountains but this week I found I lost my job, so its time to move on. The employment situation here for a pilot is just not happening at all, so we are moving back to Florida at the end of April.

This is the current situation here with our little greenhouse that could, its has survived the winter, only costing us about $20 extra per month to heat it to no lower than 55 F at night, and during the days it was around 65F …even when it was 10 F outside !

We had a nice lot of strawberries all winter, and lettuce and bok choi. Surprisingly the only herb to live the winter was the rosemary! As we are in the last month all thats left now is our peppers that are plants that are nearing a year old, and some really nice tomato plants. These tomatoes are the cold weather type from Canada you buy from Reimers Seeds, which I mentioned in a previous post.

The next version of this blog will be growing plants in the tropics! so check back in May for updates.

So here is the last post of it all, and what it looks like:

Yes its January, its cold (32F daytime and 10F at night) and the little greenhouse that could is still hard at work. We still have an aphid problem, and insecticide just isnt doing anything, so we have gone natural and this week ordered 1500 ladybugs from California. Honestly I thought we would have rid the greenhouse of aphids when the soil was all removed… but no they are still there, and worse than when it was a soil based garden.

At the moment we have changed both hydroponic systems to Age Old Organics Liquid Soil Part A and Part B mix. Its cheap and seems to be making the plants grow extremely well.

We have had the coldest week since havng the greenhouse up, with temps dropping to around-5 F / -25 C the greenhouse heater has been able to just keep the inside temp at 55F at night, with daytime temps in the 60-70F range. So not hugely hot, but when you go in there from outside you definitely feel like you are in summer.

With some modifications to the left side ebb and flo system as the roots grew the flow slowed in the upper pipes, so had to change the pipe angle to let more water out of the top pipes, which of course meant a couple of days of drips as I tried to plug them with silicon.  The right side drip system has leak still in one of the buckets in the outlet pipe, still cant get it to seal… one day but its not a big leak.

The tomatoes are growing like mad, and we have already been able to get some nice sized peppers from the plants, and many strawberries… although they get eaten normally before they get to the back door of the house!

The only real problem at the moment is the seedlings, we are having a hard time getting them to grow, so this week I tried to plant some in soil with the intention of washing off the soil once they have grown to transplant size…we will see if it succeeds.

Well its been a while since I have updated this blog, with recurrent training at work and then vacation it just has been too hard to do the updates, but here it is!

The hydroponics now rule the greenhouse, which is great as there is no way to have a watering system for soil based plants when its below freezing outside.

Today is was 8 F outside, there was snow on the greenhouse roof and it was 55 – 60 F inside (with the help of a fan heater set at 55 F )

The idea is to replicate a expensive ebb and flow hydroponic system.

The ingredients (all bought from Home Depot)

• 1/2″ irrigation pipe – 50ft roll
• 1/4″ irrigation tube – 50 ft roll
• 8 x 1/2″ T fittings
• Pack of 10 of 1/4″ couplers
• 8 x 5 gallon buckets
• 19 gallon dark colored tote with lid
• 2 x large bags of perlite
• tube of silicon
• 170 gph aquarium or fountain pump
• aquarium air pump
• aquarium air stone
• aquarium water heater
• timer – multiple on off (need to be able to do 4hrs on then 4hrs off)
• hydroponic chemicals
• cable ties (25 pack)

As a way to cheaply keeps the plants roots from freezing and keep the soil warm, I came across an article on using a ropelight to warm the soil.

The rope light uses just 5 watts of power, is totally waterproof and is flexible. We leave it on 24/7, the soil temp in punnets for seedlings stays at 70 F, and we fed it thru some planter boxes to help keep he soil warm, so far it seems to work.

Have a look:

My idea is to insulate the inside walls of the green house and cover the whole green house with a clear solar pool blanket, the one like bubble wrap.

So stage one was the internal walls.

Initially I thought I would just do 2 ft up the sides, and the wall that wont get the direct sun through it in the winter…. the northern wall. But after seeing how thin the plastic is on this greenhouse and the heat loss it already had I decided to try and cover all side walls and leave the roof open.

Using simple construction 2 inch polystyrene insulation panels I lined the inside of the walls.

So far it seems to be working well. The outside temp can be 40F (5C) and the inside temp is around 60 F (15C). There is a heater in there but at the moment it hardly comes on, it is set at 60F. The inner side is pure white, so it seems to work in reflecting the light around quite well , and the plants dont seem to suffer at all.