Greenhouse 2 Construction Finished

We fought the high winds yesterday to put the roof up on our second Rion Prestige Greenhouse. The doors were hung and roofing brace cables installed. The hard part comes next - a layout of plumbing and electrical support for the plants we will be putting inside. We are weighing our options of expanding the "Berry House" into this greenhouse, flowers, dwarf fruit trees, or a little of all the above. Tough choices.

Grow 6 Seedlings

We have had several of the new seeds sprout already. I gave them all a very diluted taste of what they will be drinking in the AeroFlo36 in about a week. Roma tomatoes look great in the grow room, getting more white eggplant too.

RION Sisters in Sight

We have been slow to get our second greenhouse under construction due to high winds every day for about the last 45 days. We had a break earlier this week which allowed us to get the foundation frame, base, and first set of windows installed. Today we are putting the second row of windows and and topping it with the roof. Basic construction will be done today!

Grow 6

Well it has been a while since we did another major grow in the indoor room. We were busy helping all of our friends getting ready for outdoor spring planting by starting their plants for them in our AeroFlo36 not to mention all the Rion Prestige Greenhouse activities which we call the Berry House. Hey, what are friends for right?

We love tomatoes but I have to tell you, growing them indoors with an eight foot ceiling is challenging - especially if you hang grow lights from the ceiling. We have traditionally grown only heirloom and organic seeds but I am trying a hybrid now out of necessity - height limitations.

We have three tomato plants, two indicate that they are bush tomatoes (Bush Steak Hybrid and Bush Early Girl) and we are also planting a Tumbler Hybrid but it is not a bush tomato (just trying it out).

In addition we have planted Romaine since we eat it so fast, organic cucumber (another climbing wonder), Zucchini (we have had great success with these), Jalapeno, Red and Yellow Sweet Peppers.

Another test is for the Ultimate Plant Cage (http://globalgardenfriends.com/the-ultimate-plant-cage/). We have a challenge with our peppers and tomatoes getting top heavy with the fruits and our Ebb n Gro system does not have nice insets for PVC pipe like the PowerGrower does to help support the plants. We have tried netting, but it didn't work as we thought it would to support the plants from the PowerGrower.

So with the new grow, a new product test and some new plant tests...stay tuned. We planted seeds today and will be back to you soon on the results

Survived The Storm

We had quite a storm night before last with quarter sized hail, 65 mph horizontal winds, and an inch of rain in less than an hour. We needed the rain desperately but I would have rather had it come in a different format.

I thought the greenhouse and all of our work was toast for sure, and since it happened at 11:30pm I couldn't do a damage assessment until yesterday morning. Let me just say it could have been a lot worse.

We had one side window and 5 roof windows blow out of the greenhouse. After finding all of the parts and pieces on the ranch we began putting it back together. Three hours later we were buttoned up again as if nothing happened. All the plants survived, the control systems that got drenched with rain were all fine (thank goodness we used a waterproof control box) and even the pumps survived the multiple power outages/restorations.

I think the shade screen that we installed late last week helped keep all the roof windows from blowing out. Rion states that the greenhouse can survive 80mph winds. With 65 mph and only minimal disruption, we were pleased and continue to say this is one of the best greenhouse kits on the market

Geeting Ready For A New Grow

As you can see we have cleaned up the grow room and have pruned all the plants that were crowding everything else in the room. We have a few remaining tomato plants in the AeroFlo36 that we are proving to a friend for his outdoor garden. The PowerGrower has been cleared for new plants as well

We have several varieties of bush tomatoes we are going to plant along with zucchini and more pepper plants. We may even add another cucumber plant.

We will be trying a new device in our grow room and will give you more details on it when it arrives. Hopefully it will help us with an irritating issue we have been having with potted plants.

Berry House Nutrients

If you are interested in growing hydroponic blackberries, blueberries, raspberries or strawberries in a greenhouse there really isn't a whole lot of reference materials that I have found on commercial hydroponic nutrient applications.  We took a "we'll try these" approach and so far so good:

Blackberries / Strawberries / Raspberries

Flora Micro / Flora Grow during vegitative state at 10ml/gallon
Flora Micro / Flora Bloom during transition and flowering state at 10ml/gallon
Diamond Nectar at 10ml/gallon
Liquid Karma at 10ml/gallon
Sweet (Berry) at 15ml/gallon
Cal-Mag at 8ml/gallon
Flora Kleen at 5ml/gallon
pH at 6.6-6.8

Blueberries - same as above except pH at 4.9-5.1

If you have other ideas or formulas that work, please let us know.  We started the plants we received from Burpee at one half of these formulations just to get them started.  We changed to full strength after three weeks.

Berries Growing Well in Rion Greenhouse

Our "Berry House" is doing very well.  We have been in production for several weeks now and we are very happy with the results.

We installed the Rion Greenhouse shade this week to help cut down on the heat we were getting inside the house.  The plants are getting plenty of water but needed a little shade.  We also added a circulating fan to move the air a bit more across the plants now that they are flowering.

As you can see in the video, water heater insulation blankets were placed around the Monster Ebb n Gro nutrient barrels to cut down on heat absorption.  We added a four inch air stone disk to each of the strawberry nutrient tanks as well.

Clean Those Systems!

Our PowerGrower started having problems over the last week.  Water was not leveling out in all of the PowerGrower units; water was not dripping from the rings as it should; and one of my pepper plants was starting to have issues. 

Well, we just got so busy and we started manually taking water out of the reservoir and distributing it to the PowerGrower units until we could spend a day to really do a lot of work in the grow room.  That day came yesterday.  We had added FloraKleen to the system last week to help loosen the salts anticipating the cleanup was coming.

What we found:

     1.  Several plants (Zucchini mainly) had root masses that were so large
          that they began to grow back up into the water connection lines
          between the pots.  The growth choked off the free flow of water
          between the pots.

     2.  The air pump needed a serious cleaning as salt and dust particles
          were clogging the normal flow of air to the lines.  Several lines
          were not functioning at all.

What we accomplished:

     1.  Since our zucchini plants were had already served us well and were
          on their last legs, we removed them from the system.  Our yellow
          pepper plant was also struggling so we added it to the compost bin.

     2.  We removed all of the debris from the air pumps, changed several
           lines, and ordered a rebuild kit in case the pump went south in the future.

     3.  We have the system running normally again  -   Lesson learned
           - MAINTENANCE SHOULD NOT BE PUT OFF