This is my first greenhouse! My husband got it for me from Costco, but it took him 6 hours to put together, and the pre-drilled holes did not line up with the screws that sometimes bumped into each other and had to be drilled in a different location.
The spring loaded mechanism has a temperature sensor, that whenever it gets too hot, it expands and pops the roof door open, which is cool!
My New Greenhouse
Here is a 5-minute tour of my new greenhouse:
Having a greenhouse expands your growing season by being able to start seeds early without having to buy grow lights, especially if you don’t have the indoor space to do it.
I got trays to go under the small plastic containers, where I placed seed starter soil and wet the soil before planting the seeds to the correct depth. Then I labeled each pot with a black Sharpie marker on a popsicle stick.
I’m growing more green beans this year, as well as bell peppers that did well last year. Cucumbers did well in a somewhat shaded area that other seeds did not do well in, so I will grow cucumbers again in that first raised bed I showed you last year.
Place your greenhouse in a sunny location if you can, close to your house so you can keep an eye on the moisture of the seedlings, that they don’t dry out before they germinate. Also place an outdoor thermometer in the greenhouse so you can see what the temperature is. One day it was cold, and I placed a large pot of hot water with the lid on, into the greenhouse and set it on the ground. The heat ematated up from it for several hours to keep the seedlings warm.
I’m feeling so excited and inspired this year to create a new set of vegetable beds! Vegetables are so much yummier from the garden than from the store, and there are no perticides in my backyard because I will be using natural ways to keep pests away.
Once again, I used the sun lamp from the hydroponic garden to start my vegetable seeds this year. I placed an old cookie sheet under the seeds so that water wouldn’t get all over the counter. I am growing three heirloom tomato plants in the hydroponic garden. Then I’m also growing green beans, peas, cucumbers, melon, watermelon, and lettuce. My lettuce grew successfully from seed last year and produced a harvest throughout the entire summer.
My husband got me a couple of raised cedar vegetable beds, and I found some tall trellises at Lowe’s that were half the price of Costco. We filled the raised beds with good organic soil made especially for vegetables.
I’ve been studying about companion planting. Basil is a good herb to grow beside tomato plants because they keep the tomato pests away. Cucumber grows well with green beans and peas. I grabbed a sheet of paper and began scribbling where I would place each plant for maximum happiness for the garden.
Come to find out, cucumber doesn’t like basil, so I scribbled it out and placed it next to the peas instead of the green beans. The back of the raised garden bed is where the trellises are, so the green beans and the peas will be climbing those trellises. I have some poles to put the cucumbers on. I found some potato starts at a local gardening store, and green beans produce nitrogen that potatoes need, so I want to put potatoes next to the green beans.
Watermelon and melon grow along the ground, so they can grow around the potatoes and tomatoes, if they run out of space. We also got jalapeño peppers and red and yellow bell pepper plant starts. My husband and third son love jalapeños, and I use bell peppers in salads and other dishes.
I have an apricot tree that hasn’t started producing yet. I placed lupine flowers next to it on both sides, because they produce nitrogen that fruit trees need. Then I placed ruby red bottle brush in front of the fruit tree to draw more bees to pollinate all my produce.
The raised bed I showed you last year on my YouTube channel cracked over the winter, so I had one of my sons remove the legs and place it on the ground. I planted strawberries in it, because strawberries are invasive, and I want them contained. The strawberries in the terra cotta strawberry planter mostly came back, surprisingly, after so many freezes and thaws last winter.
On my back porch I’ve planted wisteria in large pots to grow over the pergola and draw more pollinators to the backyard. I also placed annuals inside the pots. One of the annuals is marigolds because they keep mosquitoes away, and I was just bit the other day before I decided to get an insect-repellent flower. Red geraniums have always been an easy flower to plant, and I got some small blue flowers to round out the splash of color.
I’m looking forward to see how successful my vegetable gardens will be. I will try to come back and drop another picture in here, to show you what it looks like when it’s all producing yummy vegetables!
It’s been a while since I’ve started vegetables from seeds, so I thought I would try it again this year. We planted these back in March, so now that it’s May, we have transplanted the seedlings outside. We filmed the entire process, giving tips along the way. Make sure to check your weather forecast to make sure that it will not freeze overnight in your area before transporting the plants outside.
I show you in this video the whole process of starting vegetables from seeds:
We planted the seeds in seed trays, using seed starting mix instead of regular soil, because the seed starting mix keeps moist better. You can use old yogurt containers or other small containers instead of seed trays.
Make sure to have a grow light, which has the full spectrum of sunlight so that the seeds can get off to a good start. Otherwise you can place them in a sunny window.
Put cellophane over the rows of seeds, to keep the seeds moist and to cut down on the amount of times you need to water them.
Use a spray bottle to water, so that the seeds don’t get washed away.
Some seeds grow faster than others. Some take a few weeks to germinate. As you can see in the video, the green bean plant sprouted high above the others, reminding me of the Jack and the Beanstalk story!
Starting Vegetables from Seeds (video tutorial)
After a couple of months, you will want to transplant the seedlings outside. Some of the plants were getting too tall for the grow light, but the frost outdoors hadn’t passed yet, so I just transplanted the taller seedlings into larger containers and placed them in a sunny window.
I have a raised garden bed in partial shade, so I chose veggies that like the shade, such as lettuce and spinach, to plant in it. Then I set up a trellis next to my house, and I planted the climbing varieties of vegetables along the trellis. Green beans, for example, need a structure to climb up. You might want to stake those up with a wooden shishkabob skewer like I did in the house in the sunny window, using a twist tie to make sure they don’t fall over.
Growing your own vegetables is a great way to eat healthier and tastier food. I will be growing an even larger vegetable garden next year!
How would you like to create a backyard oasis? Everyone needs more of nature, and gardening is calming for your body and mind. When you sit on your porch, what do you see? With a little effort and a few tips, I will show you how to improve your outdoor space.
Gardening: Your Backyard Oasis (video demonstration)
Make a beautiful haven where you can sit and pray or think about life, and get away from it all. I started filming this video near the end of April, and now it’s the end of May. So I show the progression of the backyard, awakening from the winter, and blooming into the spring and summer.
We also hung lights around the backyard deck for the first time, changing the atmosphere in the evenings to a festive experience, which I will show you by the end of the video.
Vegetable Garden Tips
The first tip for vegetable gardens is to have raised beds so that you can dump really good soil into them. When I first moved into this property 20 years ago, I didn’t know that the soil was not good for growing anything. Not only was it too sandy with rocks (look at the dirt that I’m sitting on in the video), but the 23 pine trees on our property make the soil acidic. Furthermore, most of my backyard is in shade because of the trees.
I love the fact that my backyard looks like the woods. But eventually I realized that the only way to improve my yard was to grow mostly shaded plants. Tip #2 for a vegetable garden, then, is to try to find a place where there is sun. We finally found a place (that used to be a dirt pile) to the right of our deck.
Last year we only had one raised bed, as you can see in the picture below. I didn’t know how large the plants would grow, so I overcrowded it. For this reason, even though there were lots of leaves, the plants didn’t produce much fruit.
So tip #3 for a vegetable garden is not to overcrowd the plants. Leave space between the plants. Then the roots won’t be competing for the nutrients in the soil with any other plants, and the sun can shine on all the leaves of each plant.
Tip #4 would be to give the vegetable garden a good watering every day, especially when the plants are young.
Tip #5 is to have tomato cages for the tomatoes, and if you are growing beans or other vines, place the raised bed next to a fence so they have something to crawl up. Next year I might add a third bed next to the chain link fence just for this purpose. This year all I needed was the tomato cages to re-enforce the stems of the tomato plants, so they don’t topple over or break with the wind.
Tip #6 is to pick off any dead leaves that you see. This keeps the plants healthy.
Perennial Garden Tips
At the beginning, the perennial garden didn’t look like much. When removing the pine needles and dead leaves, we saw a few green perennials coming up. (Perennials are flowers that come up year after year.) We trimmed the bushes, pulled some weeds, and amended with good soil. After a month of watering the garden, it looked beautiful!
This perennial garden is right outside the bay window of my dining room, so it can be enjoyed every time we sit down to eat a meal.
Rose Garden Tips
My rose garden is in the front yard, but I thought I would include it in the gardening that we do. I show you in the video how to prune the rose bushes after uncovering them from the winter. We also put rose fertilizer on each bush. Roses are my favorite flower, so I really love this garden!
The back porch looks lovelier this year than ever, since my husband hung lights on poles bolted down to blocks of cement. (I show you a close-up of the base of these poles in the video.) My husband placed a hook on the top of each pole, and strung white lights. It feels like I am in Europe, where I traveled and lived before I was married. It makes me feel so much joy!
Here are some other gardening posts you might like:
Hi! I'm Susan Evans. I speak at homeschool conferences about hands-on learning and run a huge unit study membership site. I also speak at women's retreats on the topic of prayer.
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