WINTER: After several years, I’ve learned a few things about how things grow and when and where I should plant things in the future. I’d had high expectations that things would grow like they do outside, since the optimum warmth would be kept high. However, without the addition of an artificial light source, the plants receive fewer hours of light per day during the winter months. They grow much more slowly than they do in summer outside! As the spring days gradually getting longer, the plants grow faster. Some things do better than others: the cold-season crops such as kale, chard, spinach and lettuces have done well during the winter. The tomatoes are quite productive, but the tomatoes are smaller and ripen much more slowly than in summer months. Since our greenhouse is not as tall as stand-alone greenhouses typically will be, I can’t plant tall things. I’ve learned to stay with “compact” varieties of all plants, especially tomatoes. The only exception to that is I usually plant one or two indeterminate tomatoes that can be trained along the beam above.

SUMMER: In summer months the greenhouse is used primarily for tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers & occasionally a winter squash or two (smaller, compact varieties). The tomatoes & pepper do not do well outside here and are reserved for greenhouse growing. I try to keep the tomatoes in the bed that’s farthest from the front windows, as it can be quite hot in those front beds, even for tomatoes. Since the winter squash can be started much earlier in the greenhouse than it can outdoors, I’m often able to use the male flowers from the greenhouse to hand-pollinate the outdoor squash. Since natural pollinators are few in the mountains, I depend on hand-pollinating the squash. 

When planting the beds by the windows, I had planted some of the larger things, such as kale and swiss chard, at the back of the beds, thinking that the shorter plants in front should be more accessible to me, but I wasn’t thinking about the larger plants by the windows shading the plants closer to the inside edge. Although the shorter plants may be harder to get at, they should have been planted closer to the windows behind the taller plants from the perspective of where I stand to work. 

I’d read that growing zucchini vertically is a space saver, and a good way to grow it in a greenhouse. I tried that, and I’m glad I did. Rather than having the plant sprawl across the bed, it is growing nicely upward, saving space around it for other things. The zucchinis are easy to see and easy to pick. 

With the year-round greenhouse, I have little need to do canning! I used to plant LOTS of tomatoes and spent the late summer months in the kitchen with dozens of canning projects. Now that I have year-round tomatoes, I rarely do canning, unless I have an over-abundance of tomatoes all at the same time. I’ll occasionally make just a couple of my favorite recipes, such as sweet chile sauce. Additionally, I used to grow extras of things like broccoli or cauliflower for freezing or cabbage for sauerkraut during the summer months, but I no longer do that: I can enjoy it fresh all year. I reserve the outdoor garden for the things that cannot be grown in the greenhouse or just do better outside.