It has been a brutal summer with over eighty days of 105+ temperatures. Normally we get a week here or there in August, but nothing like this. Couple that with a severe drought, and the rest is history.
We learned a lot about operating a greenhouse in the summer. A comment was made in one of our posts about burying the water reservoirs. I absolutely recommend this - except where you have caliche (sand/water compacted like concrete) as we do. Nothing short of a jackhammer, or some dynamite, can penetrate. Hence, burying was not an option for us - only a chiller.
The heat stress on our berries was pretty intense. We also noticed some sagging in our grow trays. This occurred over time and most likely was a combination of weight from the Hydroton and the heat. We are rethinking medium for next summer.
The raspberries and blueberries were doing ok until the intense heat of summer. We did have a heat / drought tolerant blackberry that did great - right up to the point where we took drought to an extreme by losing a system controller. Those that survived that incident are doing well again.
As you can see we removed the mixing tank and two grow systems from the house. Our thought of having that many systems in one greenhouse was misguided. We are down to one Monster Ebb n Grow, and the three stands for the strawberries. We will continue with this plan for next summer with a few other re-engineering thoughts between now and the cool weather. Once winter hits we will do some additional changes and hopefully next year have a better result in the greenhouse.
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